On 4/14/2013 10:03 AM, Alan Corey wrote: > This is ridiculous. A whole year and a half and it's been abandoned.
You get a year, free, where people will happily help you. > Look at how long FreeBSD or Debian supports their versions. Debian supports two releases back too, as I recall, they just take a lot longer between releases. FreeBSD does a lot of what looks like crazy work to maintain multiple versions, but they also have the occasional $250k+ donor (and they still don't release as frequently as OpenBSD). > Now I actually /use/ OpenBSD, every day, on 3-4 machines. Consider > them production machines even though I'm retired. Isn't it nice having free technical support for production machines? Yet it has its limits. > I do experimental > things with the likes of Gnuradio and the Osmocom suite lately, not > the operating system. I might replace an operating system once in the > 3-5 year expected life of a hard drive. Poor security procedure, poor disaster recovery procedure. > I could understand if Microsoft stopped supporting Vista, because it > was so bad many places wouldn't even use it, but OpenBSD 5.0 isn't > that different from 5.2. I would understand it less if a software license I'd paid so much for came with only a year of support. It turns out the world makes at least a little sense. > Some things don't work under 5.2, just as some things don't work under > 5.0. You fix bugs, you introduce new ones, it isn't always an > improvement from the user's perspective. We used to have a policy of > never buying a Windows version until the first service pack came out. 5.2 IS the service pack for 5.1. 5.1 IS the service pack for 5.0. The developers put a lot of effort into making each upgrade categorically better. > Once again we're off on a tangent and I never got an answer to my > question of how to mix ports and non-ports versions of things. > Something like a way to uninstall a port without having to uninstall > everything that depends on it. Or replace a port from sources and > leave everything else in place. The main answer you got is "run -current for the most current packages, where this is less of a problem." And you went off on a tangent on how it's unacceptable that all of this software you are downloading for free didn't come with all the free tech support you wanted. Another answer might be "use ports if they work for you, don't if they don't." You *can* maintain multiple versions of things if you use different paths, introducing about as much heartache as you'd expect. -- Matthew Weigel hacker unique & idempot . ent
