On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 04:42:34PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote: > If you find the 9.20 vs 9.18 matters to you, explaining why would be > useful. If it's just "I'd like them to be the same so I don't have to > deal with variation", that's fair enough.
Wrt BIND in particular, I try to follow ISC guidelines. So when they say 9.18.50 is EOL I prefer to avoid it. Similarly, when ISC says 9.20.30 is recommended (and ESV), I prefer to use that if possible. It'd be nice if my BIND servers ran the same version, but from a config and zone file standpoint, I've rarely had big issues if they're at least in the same release branch. So NetBSD 9.20.* in NetBSD base is in the same ballpark as FreeBSD, Alpine, and Debian for me. More generally, sure it'd be great to run the same recent version of <package> across all my systems, but I'm a pragmatist too. :-) Still, when a given server has a specific duty, like DNS, I'm likely to be more particular about that than e.g. screen or vim versions. > In base, we generally try not to make possibly destablizing changes on > branches. > In pkgsrc, we aim to have the most recent version that upstream declares > as a stable release. We have older branches if that seems necessary for > users. Understood on both counts. To be clear, I'm not criticizing NetBSD here, simply trying to get back up to speed on what to expect. > I can see that but I don't think you are suffering from it being in > base. If anything, you are troubled by pkgsrc being behind. I think that puts it pretty well. I'd like to see 9.20.30 ESV in base, but would be happy to have that version in pkgsrc if older 9.20.* is considered more appropriate for base due to stability goals or other needs. Maybe a followup question would help clarify: how often does something 3rd-party like BIND get upgraded in NetBSD base? E.g. in minor releases, or only in major releases? I confess I haven't tracked it closely. It sounds like 9.20.30 in pkgsrc is wip so I have no big complaints. I may give it a try here myself, even though I'm pretty happy with binary packages. Cheers, sr.
