[rescue] best NetBSD support

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, June 17, 2002 at 15:45:47 (-0400), Big Endian wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] best NetBSD support
>
> This is bullshit.

No, it's your ignorance and unfounded assumptions talking.

>  To use an analogy I heard recently, men shouldn't 
> be required to wear cups while walking down the sidewalk.

If you want to be coddled then there are any number of semi-commercial
free-OS vendors who'll be more than willing to try to meet your demands
in return for some small sum.

> Well since the NetBSD Foundation is the end all be all of operating 
> system experts, then they absolutely have the authority to say what 
> an operating system should do.

Well, if that's your attitude then:  "Good luck, so long, thanks for
playing".  NetBSD's definition of goals for NetBSD is for NetBSD alone
and not for your coddle-ware.  How you could assume otherwise is beyond me!

>  I'm sorry but "I'm bored so I'll do 
> something else instead of fixing my own bugs" is a microsoft way of 
> making an OS.

There you go deciding how other people must spend their volunteer
efforts again....


> and if you go here:
> http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/curr_info.html
> 
> you find out that "fully supported" means that not everything works 
> right, but at least its usable for the most part.

and if you quoted the actual words instead of trying to interpret them
on your own you wouldn't be even more misleading in your connotations
than they are.  Blatantly turning a list of caveats into a complaint
that they're not doing what you think they should be doing shows just
how unfounded your assumptions are:

   If you are willing to live with random programs dying on you due to
   partially broken support for the 68LC040, the follow machines might
   also be considered as "supported", provided you have an external SCSI
   disk for those machines which have an internal IDE drive:  [[....]]


   Note: "Fully supported" implies that the Mac will run off of its
   local console and disk (i.e. console-based video, keyboard, and disk
   are working).  This means that the system is pretty much "usable".
   Many other features such as ethernet support or full video support
   may not yet be available.

>From an OS engineer's point of view if it boots and it runs multi-user
and you can login on it then it's probably good enough to label "fully
supported".  Other devices and sundry crap is user and application
specific.  If you want to do something other than just run an OS then
you'll need to analyse your requirements and figure out where to go from
a "running" system to a "functional" system, for your definition of
"functional".

If you can't read the above quoted text and figure out that it's not
meeting up with your definition of "fully supported" then you should
probably stay far away from trying to use a system like NetBSD.

>[[....]] they should at least build a matrix of systems, a 
> gradient of support and a list of what doesn't work on each system 
> (ala macppc: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/models.html).

Perhaps you still don't understand how NetBSD development, support,
documentation, "marketing" and such works.  It's all volunteer work.

If you want a matrix for mac68k just like macppc has then why the heck
don't you create it and submit it to the web site maintainers!?!?!?!?
If you're not capable of doing it yourself, and you can't afford to pay
someone who is capable, then don't complain about it not being there.
If you don't think they've even considered creating one then you might
try suggesting it, but you'll likely only get results if you try a bit
harder to make it sound a little less like a whining complaint.

Put your money/time/etc. where your mouth is.

Meanwhile what I read on the mac68k/curr_info.html page shows to me
pretty much what will and will not work.  I don't need a silly table to
figure it out -- such fluff is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>