[geeks] State of the BSDs (Was: [rescue] Transplanting a Sun Fire V210 motherboard - PSU requirements?)

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On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 02:38:23AM -0500, Mouse wrote:
> > OpenBSD has a fixed release schedule, twice a year.  That means you
> > know how much time you need to spend upgrading, and when you need to
> > do it.
> 
> When, maybe.  But how much time?  Er, no.  Some upgrades break things
> worse than others; I've just spent days trying to adapt a bunch of my
> stuff to a new NetBSD version (and so far mostly succeeding, though one
> of the most important is still ongoing).  In contrast, the time taken
> for some other upgrades has, loosely speaking, been limited by nothing
> but how fast I could type the commands.

Empirical experience for me is that upgrades on OpenBSD with the recent
tools are painless and take very little effort. Whatever your experience is
I can only report my own results.

> Of course, Net is not Open.  But I can't believe Open doesn't change;
> if it didn't, there'd be no point in either releasing or installing new
> versions.  And every change risks breaking something.

I agree with that last sentence, but that's always been the choice. Stay on
an old system (which I have no objection to) or get new features and risk
breakage. Still, OpenBSD breaks less than the other *NIX like OS I've used
except for Slackware, which also "just works". I feel OpenBSD is well tested
and updated sanely.

> > The tools and package management are finally to the point doing this
> > is very close to painless.
> 
> Oh...are you under some kind of delusion that nobody ever runs anything
> but OS-supplied packages?

No, I'm not under any delusions of any kind as far as I know. I spent enough
years compiling everything from source that I actually prefer not to use
package management at all. But in some cases, it is easier to use it.
There's no need to be rude or condescending. I feel I've spoken to you (and
about you) respectfully.

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