On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:49:18PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote: > On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:22:35AM +0000, David Holland wrote: > > Because of these trends, I've been thinking for a while now that maybe > > it's getting to be time to fork. That would allow having one project > > that intends to stay current, with all the attendant requirements, > > which probably mostly doesn't make sense on vintage hardware; and > > another project that explicitly abandons most or all of that and > > instead concentrates on being the best possible traditional multiuser > > or workstation Unix, which does make sense on vintage hardware that > > was designed for (or could be adapted to) those roles, and which also > > makes sense on newer hardware to the extent it's consistent with the > > traditional role. > > I would argue that this has happened already - FreeBSD and NetBSD are > the results... at least from the outside, this is how it looks like, > with FreeBSD focusing on few platforms but modernizing itself quite > a bit (kernel preempting, zfs, ...) and NetBSD focusing on "it runs > everywhere".
Yes, see, this is the problem. "It runs everywhere" now means "it is an OS for junkyard machines". That was never the intent when that was NetBSD's market positioning, 15+ years ago. Nor is it the reality now. > I'm not sure the BSD worlds needs yet another fork. No, it doesn't. On the other hand, running the same OS on 32-way x86_64 and Sparc IPC is increasingly not feasible or sensible. > Now, speaking as application developer: I'd hate to see yet another BSD > fork that I have to test OpenVPN on regularily, to see whether "we" or > "they" broke something and system-specific parts need to be adjusted... > (right now, we build and test on FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, and > various versions of those - sufficiently subtly different that there > has to be system-specific code for ifconfig/route handling...) Dragonfly? What about all the OpenBSD offshoots? -- David A. Holland dholl...@netbsd.org