# NetBSD 8.0 RC1 announced



## Sensucht94 (Apr 21, 2018)

A first formal (stable) NetBSD 8.0 RC1 release is now available:

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2018/04/19/msg094518.html

Relevant release notes draft:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/maya/release-notes-8-draft/


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## ronaldlees (Apr 21, 2018)

I like NetBSD, but this could get modded.  http://www/daemonforums.org is a better place to put NetBSD announcements.  Really, I think somebody should put up a forum for NetBSD, so other forums are not used in lieu of ... maybe when I have some spare time LOL ...


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 21, 2018)

ronaldlees said:


> I like NetBSD, but this could get modded.  http://www/daemonforums.org is a better place to put NetBSD announcements.  Really, I think somebody should put up a forum for NetBSD, so other forums are not used in lieu of ... maybe when I have some spare time LOL ...




You're right: DaemonForums are a nice forum, I hang from time to time there, without actually posting, if not for a couple of occasions. A pity it seems dying out. Fact is that I expect the few NetBSD users who still attend it to be already aware of the new release (my impression is that just a bunch of very experienced veterans, like you, are still on it), while here you can find many more casual users who may be interested in a friendly remainder, as they don't care about having their INBOX being filled up with NetBSD's src-changes just to keep track of new commits. Besides that, netbsd-users, netbsd-current and pkgsrc-bugs mailing lists are quite active and lively, actually way more than the NetBSD Daemon Forums section, and defy the purpose of having a forum. I wonder though, since a forum is usually more comfortable, what about linking the Daemon Forums on netbsd-users, for those who are not aware of it? 

Anyway, chat aside, if the post were to be removed, I'd understand immediately, it's a FreeBSD forum in the end, and thanks for the hint


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## jb_fvwm2 (Apr 21, 2018)

Persons post every so often with FreeBSD questions on daemonforums.org -- [ I check the new posts each day, but skip netbsd threads for OpenBSD and FreeBSD ...  ]


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## scottro (Apr 21, 2018)

There used to be a privately owned FreeBSD forums. The owner got sick and there were only a couple of moderators, as others had left, and the spam became too much. When it was plain that that the owner wasn't going to do anything, daemonforums was begun and was becoming the substitute. However, after a few months, FreeBSD began these forums, which became the main FreeBSD forum.  

Daemon forums remained, and gradually became more of an OpenBSD forum. Although it's not very active, there are lots of knowledgeable people there. 

As for the relevance of the NetBSD post, we have two and three page posts about how bad systemd is, so I would think that a post about NetBSD would be allowed.


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## fernandel (Apr 21, 2018)

ronaldlees said:


> I like NetBSD, but this could get modded.  http://www/daemonforums.org is a better place to put NetBSD announcements.  Really, I think somebody should put up a forum for NetBSD, so other forums are not used in lieu of ... maybe when I have some spare time LOL ...


And post about new version of DragonFly is always tolerated.


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## sidetone (Apr 21, 2018)

I post about other BSD OS'es in the user profile. Sometimes it is to show what a feature another has, that could be here, or another is lacking. I typically see OpenBSD threads or posts here, but usually, they are in comparison to FreeBSD. This thread isn't so bad, considering, it's not asking for instructions on how to do something on another OS. The topic is still borderline.


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## Phishfry (Apr 21, 2018)

Although I have never tried any of the other BSD's, I think "Off-Topic" is a fine place for this announcement.
After all the forum sticky rules say:
_"Always ask technical/support questions about other operating systems on the forums or mailing lists associated with those operating systems."_

I don't see how you could call this tech support or support. Seeing how FreeBSD borrows NetBSD code I think we can all cheer a new version. Heck my favorite ioctl `gpioctl` was ported from OpenBSD. We must stick together being in the bottom 1 percent of OS's.


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## sidetone (Apr 21, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> I don't see how you could call this tech support or support.


No one here said it was.


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 22, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> We must stick together being in the bottom 1 percent of OS's.



Actually the 1% represent the server share: desktop/embedded share (closed source OS, like xbox's excluded)  has always stood beneath the 0.01% (~0,003) threshold, rounded down to 0,00%  on most online reports. However, the value has been growing in the last few years, until finally reaching 0,01% between 2017-2018, at least according to netmaketshare.com, which is IMHO, the most trustworthy source available at the moment. (I suppose), complicit the hardware support improvements in 12,CURRENT, and the push of TrueOS towards a 'BSD-phylosophy desktop' which made it more appealing against people's eyes, as witnessed by the growing popularity of TrueOS I'm noticing lately. Complicit also the growing popularity of OpenBSD among young developers, and the spreading dissatisfaction with systemd, glibC, udevd, GNOME and what else, as well as the criticizable path Win10 has undertaken, and the unaffordable price of current macbooks.  

Anyway, we say that for each of us running a BSD on desktop there's 9999 people at least running something else . Together with the "BSD improvement", Linux desktop share reached 3% meanwhile and I can see how this is mainly due to Steam, Netflix, Spotify, Telegram, Discord, Google Chrome etc...now available for the Linux platform


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## jb_fvwm2 (Apr 22, 2018)

forums.bsdnexus.com also had a hundred or several hundred  useful BSD threads. It is archive-only, now,  and contains stuff from 2011-13 ... 110 threads just in the Systems Administration subforum, for example.


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## Beastie7 (Apr 22, 2018)

What use cases does NetBSD actually serve?


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## robroy (Apr 22, 2018)

Beastie7 said:


> What use cases does NetBSD actually serve?



Its raison d'être's to provide a modern Unix for weird and/or old computer hardware.


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 22, 2018)

Beastie7 said:


> What use cases does NetBSD actually serve?



The main problem with NetBSD is that is lacks a leader and clear goals. In the failed attempt of making everyone happy, it's stuck in a limbo: just think about the fact it still uses CVS in order to satisfy the few devs still willing to carry out their own projects on it,   when subversion would be a much more rational choice in 2018. The official goal is portability and legacy hardware, but this is such a vague objective that there's still confusion on which archs to keep maintaining. The power to make decision is split between 2 teams, the core and the board. The board should take care of the administrative aspect and the fund-raising campaign, de facto it always "interjects" in the core's decisions preventing core to make innovations (I' actually quite against the board).

In a endless battle for survival where it gets less money than how much it spends  per year, while wrong decisions and fate brought it from being arguably the leading Unix-like OS anyone would refer to as an example to the most niche and underrated project on earth, NetBSD still manages to surprises users like me. It's a very, very clean and polished OS, extremely lightweight, quite secure, with its own Xorg built-in patched version (like OpenBSd's Xenocara), and awesome firewall (NPF), tons of amazing utilities for system management and networking in base system (including the famous rump kernels) which I really would like to see adopted in other BSDs, and whcih make it a perfect router/firewall server, aside from a great development environment. A damn buggy hateful package system (pkgsrc), which is, on the other hand,  actually really lightweight, smart-thought and portable, and you can't help but end up loving it, to the point I've used it on OpenIndiana, macOS and Slackware too. NetBSD it's just perfect for legacy hardware, niche archs and embedded, if you have an old laptop or a Rpi, just throw NetBSD on it and it's granted to be faster than anything else. The relatively good Xen port (which used to be better and it's quickly becoming outdated), wine, and the dosemu2 ports are other good pros for using it. NASA used NetBSD as base for its software run on space station in order to test and handle satellite networks

Personally I use the current branch (8.99), as it brings a lot of advantages (sndio, autofs, synaptics, the in-kernel audio mixer, metdown/spectre patches, KASLR, SMAP) over formal (which was 7.1.2 until a couple of days ago), and grants me access to the pkgsrc/wip repo, that contains a lot of software I like, including qTox, newsboat, qutebrowser, the OpenBSD's CWM version....


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## sidetone (Apr 22, 2018)

Sensucht94 said:


> it still uses CVS


Doesn't OpenBSD also use CVS by default for updating source code?

* edit - I'm not sure


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 22, 2018)

sidetone said:


> Doesn't OpenBSD also use CVS by default for updating source code?



I recon my ignorance: just used OpenBSD for a couple of weeks in the past, and It's definitely something I can't talk about =P


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## Beastie7 (Apr 22, 2018)

Sensucht94 said:


> The main problem with NetBSD is that is lacks a leader and clear goals. In the failed attempt of making everyone happy, it's stuck in a limbo: just think about the fact it still uses CVS in order to satisfy the few devs still willing to carry out their own projects on it,   when subversion would be a much more rational choice in 2018. The official goal is portability and legacy hardware, but this is such a vague objective that there's still confusion on which archs to keep maintaining. The power to make decision is split between 2 teams, the core and the board. The board should take care of the administrative aspect and the fund-raising campaign, de facto it always "interjects" in the core's decisions preventing core to make innovations (I' actually quite against the board).
> 
> In a endless battle for survival where it gets less money than how much it spends  per year, while wrong decisions and fate brought it from being arguably the leading Unix-like OS anyone would refer to as an example to the most niche and underrated project on earth, NetBSD still manages to surprises users like me. It's a very, very clean and polished OS, extremely lightweight, quite secure, with its own Xorg built-in patched version (like OpenBSd's Xenocara), and awesome firewall (NPF), tons of amazing utilities for system management and networking in base system (including the famous rump kernels) which I really would like to see adopted in other BSDs, and whcih make it a perfect router/firewall server, aside from a great development environment. A damn buggy hateful package system (pkgsrc), which is, on the other hand,  actually really lightweight, smart-thought and portable, and you can't help but end up loving it, to the point I've used it on OpenIndiana, macOS and Slackware too. NetBSD it's just perfect for legacy hardware, niche archs and embedded, if you have an old laptop or a Rpi, just throw NetBSD on it and it's granted to be faster than anything else. The relatively good Xen port (which used to be better and it's quickly becoming outdated), wine, and the dosemu2 ports are other good pros for using it. NASA used NetBSD as base for its software run on space station in order to test and handle satellite networks
> 
> Personally I use the current branch (8.99), as it brings a lot of advantages (sndio, autofs, synaptics, the in-kernel audio mixer, metdown/spectre patches, KASLR, SMAP) over formal (which was 7.1.2 until a couple of days ago), and grants me access to the pkgsrc/wip repo, that contains a lot of software I like, including qTox, newsboat, qutebrowser, the OpenBSD's CWM version....



Thanks for the explanation. Do you think its minuscule target audience warrants its' continued development? Other than the pleasure of reviving archaic hardware; I don't think there's a clear, objective reason for NetBSD to exist anymore. Has anyone ever thought about combining it's developer power into FreeBSD? 

Just my observation.


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 22, 2018)

Beastie7 said:


> Thanks for the explanation. Do you think its minuscule target audience warrants its' continued development? Other than the pleasure of reviving archaic hardware; I don't think there's a clear, objective reason for NetBSD to exist anymore. Has anyone ever thought about combining it's developer power into FreeBSD?
> 
> Just my observation.



So and so, the audience isn't minuscule as you may think (just give a look to the mailing lists to see how active they are), and proprietary implementations on embedded devices aren't so rare. Before TrueOS decided to enable a OpenRC service for bsdstats by default, Bsdstats.org reported around a 8-10% BSD share for NetBSD. NetBSD It's just not that big to make the difference or be the training horse in the open source World. The BSD-merging cause has been advertised on many BSDs forums in many occasions: although if theorically all manpower were focused on a single BSD and all good featured ported to a single kernel, then that BSD would potentially start competing again with Linux on both server and desktop, fact is that BSDs have very different goals and so do the respective developers, who I don't think would get along well with each other due to the very diverging perspectives; otherwise all these different OSs wouldn't exist in the first place. 

Speaking of NetBSD devs' philosophy and goals, it's clear they're very different from FreeBSD's ones: Juan Romero (alias 'xtreame') rather than joining FreeBSD, decided to create its own package manager which clearly emulates pkgsrc: xbps, and its own Linux distro: Void Linux, in order to pursue the same goals he was pursuing on NetBSD (but probably felt NetBSD couldn't keep up with Linux, or got tired of arguments and lack of eagerness to risk): legacy archs, embedded, lightweightness and security


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## sidetone (Apr 22, 2018)

Beastie7 said:


> Do you think its minuscule target audience warrants its' continued development? Other than the pleasure of reviving archaic hardware; I don't think there's a clear, objective reason for NetBSD to exist anymore. Has anyone ever thought about combining it's developer power into FreeBSD?


This is just me, I think NetBSD needs to fork to have an OS focused on 64 bit processors with support for more modern hardware. (I expect someone will say, OpenBSD already does a lot of that.) NetBSD has a small base system, which other BSD's don't offer, except for OpenBSD. It should remain as a small base system, so its parts are already adapable to many platforms. If NetBSD would fork, it would be nice to see a 64 bit versions focus on desktop support and newer hardware, while the original can just focus on being a modular and even more compact operating system with its current goal.

FreeBSD and NetBSD shouldn't merge on the whole, but It would be nice to see resources merged, even where both systems can have compliance or standardization. NetBSD and its Pkgsrc also has use with Minix, and if anywhere, that's where parts of it should merge.

It would be nice to see combined resources for _hardware_ among BSD's.


On another subject on comparing Ports to Pkgsrc:
One good thing about NetBSD's ports is that the simplest option available is usually used for compiling, because it by default uses files to choose those options, and doesn't have an Ncurses screen to choose, which makes it a little more difficult to choose more complicated options for compiling that become the default.

Here is a comparison of the efficiency of Ports to Pkgsrc. NetBSD uses older and complicated software support including for hardware, but still has simpler dependencies. FreeBSD has more modern and cleaned up software dependencies, yet dependencies in its ports tree is more complicated than NetBSD's. * edit - ironincally maybe using both systems of porting software help to find those inefficiencies


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 22, 2018)

sidetone, I would have never been able to find better words to say what you expressed. yes, my dream is an amd64 fork too, but at current state of things I can't see how this is going to happen. The long list of archs supported  include some which would be supported today by NetBSD only, and I feel devs don't feel like dropping them, as this would go against the 'of course it runs NetBSD' slogan. Personally I'd just say, who cares those vintage pieces for collectors, just maintain ppc, sparc64, mips, i586 and amd64! and make a much more appreciated RISC-V port. We need to organize a coup d'etat against the board and take over NetBSD


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## sidetone (Apr 22, 2018)

Sensucht94 said:


> We need to organize a coup d'etat against the board and take over NetBSD


I don't agree with that part. That's why they should fork, to have two OS'es with two different focuses: one for their current goal, including vintage and exotic hardware, to be even more modular and stripped down, while the fork for 64 bit processors to be for practical use for desktop users. Letting a fork deal with more modern hardware components, would also allow the original goals of NetBSD to be more maintainable, as they wouldn't have to focus on what the fork provides.


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## Beastie7 (Apr 22, 2018)

Sensucht94 said:


> Speaking of NetBSD devs' philosophy and goals, it's clear they're very different from FreeBSD's ones: Juan Romero (alias 'xtreame') rather than joining FreeBSD, decided to create its own package manager which clearly emulates pkgsrc: xbps, and its own Linux distro: Void Linux, in order to pursue the same goals he was pursuing on NetBSD (but probably felt NetBSD couldn't keep up with Linux, or got tired of arguments and lack of eagerness to risk): legacy archs, embedded, lightweightness and security



That's pretty interesting; i wasn't aware of that. 



sidetone said:


> NetBSD has a small base system, which other BSD's don't offer, except for OpenBSD.



I think small is relative here. For embedded systems, FreeBSD can be shredded down to fit devices with very little resources; many of which already exist in the wild, which is why I question NetBSD existence. But I get your point of it being little OOTB.


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## Sensucht94 (Apr 22, 2018)

sidetone said:


> I don't agree with that part.


It was more of a joke I felt like telling XD



> That's why they should fork, to have two OS'es with two different focuses: one for their current goal, including vintage and exotic hardware, to be even more modular and stripped down, while the fork for 64 bit processors to be for practical use for desktop users. Letting a fork deal with more modern hardware components, would also allow the original goals of NetBSD to be more maintainable, as they wouldn't have to focus on what the fork provides.



This is undoubtedly the best solution, I've been dreaming about it for a long time. EdgeBSD seemed to represent a turning poiny, they were so close I actually believed it was finally done, but the project looks like unmaintained now


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## sidetone (Apr 22, 2018)

There are purposes for NetBSD to be an OS to be available for so many architectures: vintage, hobbyists/projects, making use of hardware that otherwise can't be used. A fork would help that goal, by allowing it to be even more slimmed down, requiring less maintenance resources.



Beastie7 said:


> why I question NetBSD existence. But I get your point of it being little OOTB.


An even more slimmed down NetBSD should be for the range of hardware they desire. To make a customized slimmed down FreeBSD would require a lot of work and expertise from the user, unless one points to FreeBSD out of the box derivative MiniBSD, http://www.minibsd.org/.

I have doubts that NetBSD will be convinced to make their OS more modular for the variety of hardware, if there is a fork to allow use for more modern hardware. MirOS should actually change its direction or be an alternative to NetBSD for 32bit operating system desktops, depending on what their opinion is. (MirOS is a better candidate for collaboration with NetBSD)



Sensucht94 said:


> EdgeBSD seemed to represent a turning poiny, they were so close I actually believed it was finally done, but the project looks like unmaintained now


EdgeBSD reminds me of Bitrig, which was merged back into OpenBSD after being an environment used to work out experimental features and proposed improvements.



Sensucht94 said:


> We need to organize a coup d'etat against the board and take over


 EdgeBSD. (But I don't like the idea of taking over.)


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## sidetone (May 1, 2018)

It would be nice to see a NetBSD fork for 64bit processors that doesn't allow Gnome and other heavy desktops in its primary repository, but in a supplementary repository instead.


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