Re: Regarding the ULTRIX and OSF1 compats

On 2019-03-16 20:11, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> 
>> On Mar 16, 2019, at 11:29 AM, Johnny Billquist <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> As for me personally, yes, I am certainly guilty of mostly making noise, and few contributions. I used to do a bit more, but mostly on VAX specific stuff. But since other were making changes all the time, making the VAX port less and less usable, I instead stopped trying to fix things. So maybe I should just leave/fork/whatever. That is I guess, the way I should view all of this.
> 
> The NetBSD project even publicly states on the ports page (https://www.netbsd.org/ports/) that some platforms are more equal than others, and that it's the responsibility of those who care deeply about a non-Tier 1 platform to keep it in tip-top shape.  This is not an unreasonable position.

I know it states so. When that happened was one of those moments where 
my engagement dropped as well.

> But, consider your VAX example... even though there is a very good emulation environment available for VAX, the project is partially hamstrung by factors not necessarily under its control, e.g. the quality of compilers available for the VAX.  As I recently discovered while trying to do my own due diligence widely testing a set of cross-platform changes, C++ exceptions don't work on the VAX at all right now, so the ATF tests can't be run.  Perhaps someone who cares deeply about the VAX ought to fix the situation.  But if no one steps up, then it's fair to assume that no one in fact cares deeply about the VAX[*], and thus spending human productivity on it is not the best allocation of resources.

Broken tools is definitely a big problem.
But the fact that doing a full build have grown from a bit over one day 
to at least two weeks on an 8650 certainly didn't help either...

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: [email protected]             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol