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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Only 11 years after OpenBSD 5.5 did the same change: https://www.openbsd.org/55.html

OpenBSD doesn't have to care about compatibility as much, and has orders of magnitude less users. Which also means that changes are less likely to cause bugs from obscure edge cases.

OpenBSD (and most other BSDs) are willing to make changes that break binary backwards compatibility, because they maintain and ship both the kernel and userland together as a release and can thus "steer the whole ship", rather than the kernel being it's own separate component developed like with Linux.

Sure, that's usually true, but Debian also has that ability in this case ( they can fix, patch, or update everything in the repository). The issue is mostly with all software that isn't part of the distribution and the official repositories. Which is a lot of software especially for Debian. OpenBSD doesn't have that issue, breaking the ABI won't cause tens of thousands of user applications to break.

But I agree that Debian is still too slow to move forward with critical changes even with that in mind. I just don't think that OpenBSD is the best comparison point.

Guess where OpenSSH comes from.

What? What does that have to do with what I said? Nothing that I said was about the project as a whole. I was just saying that the OS has different constraints than Debian does. What does openssh have to do with how easy it is for OpenBSD to break ABI compatibility?

> OpenBSD doesn't have to care about compatibility as much

FreeBSD did it in 2012 (for the 2014 release of 10.0?):

* https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commit/8f77be2b4ce5e3...

And has compat layers going back many releases:

* https://www.freshports.org/misc/compat4x/

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/BinaryCompatibility

So newly (re-)compiled programs can take advantage of newer features, but old binaries continue to work.

I have you all beaten. When I discovered that the 32-bit OS/2 API actually returned a 64-bit time, I wrote a C++ standard library for my OS/2 programs with a 64-bit time_t. This was in the 1990s.

A bit off topic, but its time like this that really make me wanting to swap out the public facing server from Linx to OpenBSD

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