Re: Planned obsolescence ? (OpenBSD)

Paul Tagliamonte <[email protected]> Sun, 2 Nov 2025 17:23:52 -0500
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.68k
Message-ID	<20251102222352.GA1123451__37938.4324814723$1762122291$gmane$org@dc.cant.vote>
On Sun, Nov 02, 2025 at 09:35:49PM +0000, [email protected] wrote:
>OpenBSD has the express goal of supporting ancient hardware.

OpenBSD and Debian share many ideals. We both believe in a secure, open
baseline for humanity to stop making the same mistakes. There are some 
differences; Debian places a huge emphasis on end-user freedom in a way 
OpenBSD hasn't historically, which, fine. We also share many upstreams 
(at least within ports). We even have some shared developers.

Debian has no corperate entity -- it's only people, working together. We 
have a few nonprofits that sponsor Debian resources in a few countries, 
but none are "Debian". OpenBSD is in similar shape. I respect that.

I have a few OpenBSD boxes at home. I ensure my software I write ports 
cleanly to OpenBSD (not any of the others, FWIW). I enjoy OpenBSD a 
great deal. I find it nice to work with.

I'm very envious of OpenBSD's ability to break ABI between releases as 
part of the explicit contract. I like the security features (pledge and 
unveil are very nice things to have), and I really like the hard work 
that goes into the OS. I've sent a few (fairly minor and not very 
important) patches to misc@.

The idea that OpenBSD would continue to support an old CPU at the 
expense of a meaningful security change is an interesting take. I would 
expect the reaction there to be "fix the broken arch" not "refuse the 
security change", which, isn't far off from where my perspective here 
is. I find the view that OepnBSD supports old CPUs at great expense hard 
to square with things like[1]. There are no doubt active porters within 
OpenBSD, as there are within Debian.

There is disagreement between OpenBSD's view on Rust's cost/benefit with 
a stable, reviewed and maintained C codebase and most of the rest of the 
industry, (and within apt) -- but again, that's not important here.

I see no reason that this fairly obvious trolling has any weight here. 
If folks are interested in OpenBSD for what it does (very) well, they 
should use it, not because of an implementation language (what a hot 
take).

   paultag


[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

     Due to the increased usage of OpenBSD/amd64, as well as the age and 
     practicality of most i386 hardware, only easy and critical security 
     fixes are backported to i386. The project has more important things to 
     focus on.

-- 
   ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀               Paul Tagliamonte <paultag>
   ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  https://people.debian.org/~paultag | https://pault.ag/
   ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋        Debian, the universal operating system.
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