> to understand the purpose of the binary compats, you really have to go > way back in history. there was a time when the only way to run a > grapical browser on openbsd was to use the netscape binary under BSDi > emulation (I think it was BSDi, not 100% certain) on i386 or the solaris > binary under emulation on a sparc. there was no open source graphical > browser back then.
Actually it was the SunOS 4.x binary which would be used on sparc; fgsch@ and me tried independently to run the Solaris (SunOS 5.x) binary, but it was heavily relying upon Solaris threads, and our kernel was in no way ready for that. It could probably be done nowadays, as an exercize in futility. Miod