[1532] in NetBSD-Development
Re: Changing sysname and/or ATHENA_SYS?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan J. Williams)
Sun Jan 11 23:33:04 1998
To: Dan Winship <danw@MIT.EDU>
Cc: nathanw@MIT.EDU, netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
From: "Nathan J. Williams" <nathanw@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 11 Jan 1998 23:07:18 EST."
<199801120407.XAA19760@Implementor.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 23:32:46 EST
> - Since NetBSD is neither a supported platform, nor as popular as
> Linux, it may be hard to get locker maintainers to play along.
This is where ATHENA_SYS_PATH works for us. We set it to
"i386_nbsd13:i386_nbsd1" and avoid this problem.
> - Locker maintainers traditionally have not done the right thing
> with new @sys values anyway. Most lockers maintain one arch/@sys
> dir per platform and symlink everything else.
Ah, the "Common Assumption". It's true, this would be a
problem.
> While I agree that the AFS sysname should track the OS version, I
> think that splitting the sysname and the ATHENA_SYS value would break
> lots of things (again, particularly if it were only done under
> NetBSD.)
``It shouldn't.'' But again, you're right, I wouldn't want us
to be the ones bearing the brunt of fixing what this broke.
> 1.2 is showing its age... we may want to just encourage people to
> update to 1.3 and ignore these issues. (Although this will be harder
> with 1.4 if it really does come out in the spring.)
I suppose the build system concerns aren't really an issue
since we can grab old source trees with CVS. We should encourage
people to upgrade, and with luck an update system will make future
upgrades less painful, and users won't suffer from OS skew as much.
- Nathan
