The choice to use a NetBSD userland isn't hugely surprising in light of the project's focus on making everything as clean and portable as possible. Packages als

The choice to use a NetBSD userland isn't hugely surprising in light of the project's focus on making everything as clean and portable as possible. Packages also make a lot of sense. NetBSD did something hugely ambitious with Pkgsrc--it is like FreeBSD's ports, but was designed to build software in a coherent fashion on lots of different *nix platforms. At one point in time, I was using pkgsrc to build a somewhat complicated custom stack of open source software on AIX, compiling with IBM's XLC compiler. Can't say everything worked perfectly, but there was so much scaffolding already in place with pkgsrc that it simplified my process immeasurably.