>>> we should not have to patch and rebuild apps! >> Only buggy apps, apps that already needed patching and rebuilding >> and NetBSD just formerly let get away with their incorrect >> assumptions. > IMO there is no point to break backward compatibility just for the > sake of correctness.
That's an argument for doing this for COMPAT_* code. It's not an argument for doing it for non-compat programs. Indeed, I think it's actually better to break code depending on such incorrect assumptions, beacuse it makes it easier to find (and then fix) them. > Smoooth upgrades are a major selling point for NetBSD. NetBSD hasn't hesitated to break compatability in the past, from imposing IPv6 crap on SCM_RIGHTS messages to the cripping speed penalty 2.0 imposed on stack trampolines to the way 4.* made it impossible to self-host in 32M on x86 to the way PIDs started getting allocated weirdly somewhere along the line. I'm sure some-to-all of those provoke "who cares about that?" reactions, but they all are things that have broken something at some layer for me, that have led to less-than-smooth version changes. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
