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You may have missed the discussion from last time in which Theo explains the benefit of having older hardware. The dissatisfaction with OpenBSD seems to eerily

by eksith 13y ago

You may have missed the discussion from last time in which Theo explains the benefit of having older hardware. The dissatisfaction with OpenBSD seems to eerily mirror the incredibly short-sighted criticism of NASA funding : "Why do we spend all this money to send junk into space?" Which conveniently side-steps the innumerable benefits it produces. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2 The answer to that is not news. On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem. If you aren't in the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy. > The recent discussion of a need for a replacement > Vax for package-building illustrates that. The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the same benefits as the other architectures. Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems. Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them.

_ak 13y ago
I didn't miss it, and it's completely beside my point (N.B. I'm a VAX owner myself, playing with OpenBSD and NetBSD on it now and then, so I appreciate their efforts). I'm talking about the majority of people. Pretty much everyone uses OpenSSH, because it's the de-facto standard in SSH implementations, so that's the part of the OpenBSD project that's interesting for everyone. Vintage computing on the other side - not really interesting for most people. People just don't care about old hardware platforms, even when Theo claims that supporting them all has an overall benefit on OpenBSD as a whole.

by eksith 13y ago

_ak 13y ago

I didn't miss it, and it's completely beside my point (N.B. I'm a VAX owner myself, playing with OpenBSD and NetBSD on it now and then, so I appreciate their efforts). I'm talking about the majority of people. Pretty much everyone uses OpenSSH, because it's the de-facto standard in SSH implementations, so that's the part of the OpenBSD project that's interesting for everyone. Vintage computing on the other side - not really interesting for most people. People just don't care about old hardware platforms, even when Theo claims that supporting them all has an overall benefit on OpenBSD as a whole.