Comment by aaronmdjones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronmdjones | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one feeling a little bit disappointed with some of the software versions listed there?

I don't use NetBSD, so perhaps I'm not in "the loop", and please forgive me if so, but;

- GCC 5.5 is only one major version higher than the oldest supported version; 6 or 7 would have been a better choice while you're banging out a whole new operating system release, 6 is still fully supported, 8 was released early this year. I understand newer compilers can sometimes introduce regressions in the build process for something as large as an entire operating system, but surely they could have tested it and gotten those bugs fixed if any?

- Similarly for Clang/LLVM 3.8.1 (Really? The oldest version of Clang that you can get on a modern Linux distro? Really?).

- OpenSSL 1.0.2 is only supported for another 17 months, 1.0.2k (the version they're shipping) is 3 versions older than the current 1.0.2o, and 1.0.2p is going to be released any day now. There are at least 4 CVEs patched between 1.0.2k and 1.0.2o; I hope they're applying those patches on top of 1.0.2k manually.

NetBSD 8.0 took longer to release than intended.

The comparison to "oldest clang/gcc you can get in a linux distro" is not right, you can get a lot of different versions as packages. this refers to the base compiler which is used to build everything. GCC 8.1 is available as a package for example.

As for the base GCC versions, NetBSD is a little conservative when updating, but keep in mind that it's doing this on a lot of architectures and problems arise. a complete transition to GCC 5.x was held back somewhat by a tricky mipseb-softfloat bug, GCC 6.x (in -current) was held back by a VAX ICE. Newer GCC kills ARMv4-nonthumb support.

If that is OpenSSL 1.0.2k it probably should be updated, yeah.

Some of those architectures really need to be allowed to die. VAX was discontinued in 2000 and was on life support since 1992 when it was superseded by the Alpha.

If it were free it wouldn't matter, but as you say its held up progress on architectures people actually use.

The way netbsd does GCC updates gives a really wide margin for figuring out compiler issues:

- Copy existing compiler into gcc.old

- Add new compiler as "gcc"

- Switch architectures one by one

If one architecture is left behind it's not a big pressing issue, you have until the next GCC update. They're done once 2-3 years hopefully so the GCC VAX issue taking 6 months to resolve wasn't close to being a problem.

As for removing architecture support, as long as it builds without extreme intervention, the non-VAX crowd is going to leave it alone. The VAX code is mostly separate in its own directory so doesn't get in the way.

The people who care about VAX within NetBSD are very knowledgeable and it would be a shame to alienate them without a good reason. They've contributed a lot of non-VAX stuff too.

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