*BSD News Article 14757


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From: burgess@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (Dave Burgess)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: So you say you want an interim release of 386bsd? (What to do?)
Date: 20 Apr 1993 10:17:46 -0500
Organization: Armstrong Lab MIS, Brooks AFB TX
Lines: 61
Message-ID: <1r146qINNmbn@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>
References: <1r067g$915@lobster.sid.mcet.edu> <CGD.93Apr19235932@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <C5sCvr.3G1@unx.sas.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hrd769.brooks.af.mil

In article <C5sCvr.3G1@unx.sas.com> sastdr@torpid.unx.sas.com (Thomas David Rivers) writes:
>
>
[...crunch...]
>
>We now have at the moment; "another" 386BSD.   Should I abandon
>my current sources and switch to NetBSD?  Will the patchkit, etc...
>be moved from 386bsd to NetBSD - what is to be done?
>
>We probably should reach a consensus about how our collective support
>is to be applied.  Personally, I would like to go with NetBSD, as that
>offers a set of goals which more closely matches my own.
>
>Thus, I suggest we begin generating patch sets against that, and
>encourage everyone to move over to NetBSD.
>
>What do you think?
>

Another question is what do I do now?

I have the patched 386bsd source tree, albeit not necessarily in the Netbsd
structure.  IN addition, I have several 'server' processes, including an
enterprise wide News Server that I can't just 'dump' to load a new version of
an operating system.  While tape backups are all well and good; seriously,
where do I go from here.  Are the underlying disk structures of the 'old'
386bsd still there?  Has the partition numbering scheme for DOS fdisk 
changed?  Are there other, more insidious questions that need asked that I
don't dare utter?

I suspect, and hope (fervently hope), that by keeping up with the patchkit,
I am actually in a position to be able to change the name on what I already
have and press on from there.  I can move stuff around, and change source
directory names, but restarting from scratch is definitely out of the
question.  

Also, what is to become of the FAQ?  We have made serious progress on creating
a new FAQ (most everyone will see the first three or four sections of it on 
Wednesday) and need to keep moving.  Many of the questions/answer will 
continue to apply to both the old 386bsd (v0.1) and the new NetBSD for
a while.

Speaking of FAQs, Peter Tattum has been working on a Hypertext FAQ system that
seems to be really neat.  The new 386bsd/NetBSD faq is loaded on his server,
in Tasmania, and he is looking for a Unix guru to help him get the DOS
software that he has written translated into Unix.  E-Mail me for more
information on the FAQ or the Hypertext program...

Suffice it to say, this software announcement gives me a feeling a little 
like the one I got when I got married.  Once I start down this road, there 
is little hope of turning back.  A few words of consolation might be 
appropriate at this point for those of us who think the vnode layer is the 
one between the mustard and the cheese....

The worried maintainer of somebody's FAQ, but not just sure whose!?!?

-- 
------
TSgt Dave Burgess
NCOIC AL/Management Information Systems Office
Brooks AFB, TX