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Comment by hhw | Hacker News Reader

From Theo's comments on the mailing list:

"On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. "

"Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems.

Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them."

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which other BSD would that be?

If the answer is "NetBSD", let's consider that the expenses in 2012 for the NetBSD foundation were $6k [0].

Either they don't support the architectures the same way or they are spending the money in a smarter way.

[0] http://www.netbsd.org/foundation/reports/financial/2012.html

They absolutely do not support the architectures in the same way. Most NetBSD ports are cross compiled and not tested, you are lucky if they boot before hard locking.

OpenBSD has a strict policy that supported architectures must be self hosted, tested, and built against HEAD constantly.

There's also bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD on not so friendly terms. OpenBSD lost a number of developers when that happened. They don't appear to currently support 88K, and aim to target current architectures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it'd be worth their while to support another architecture to accommodate a developer who would do all the work to maintain that platform, as well as contribute in other areas.

There's Dragonfly BSD, which is doing several interesting things.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/

I believe that the Foundation does not have a lot of hardware, volunteers own and support them. As of a few years back there is a "tier" system for NetBSD support too, http://www.netbsd.org/ports/#tiers which means that it is up to eg the Vax maintainers to keep things working rather than everyone.

Who still uses an 88K machine? I have the CPU board from a DG/UX machine, but the latest chips are from 93/94.

The developers who volunteer their time to work on it: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/arch/m88k/incl...

Keep in mind that OpenBSD is by the developers for the developers. That it's also useful for a lot of users is just a nice side effect, helpful for testing and funding.

> Keep in mind that OpenBSD is by the developers for the developers.

It is until the developers can't afford to keep the lights on.

At home when things get though, we cut costs and hope for better times.

If OpenBSD isn't exaggerating about shutting down the project, then it seems reasonable to review their policy regarding old platforms and focus on what gives the most return.

Dropping platforms will lose them developers. Developers who also work on the main platforms, or atleast whose work crosses over.

You know what else loses developers? Shutting down the project.

Sounds like people should donate then yes? Shut down a niche arch and the developer will leave and not contribute anything, even to x86_64, just the same as the project going broke.

What proportion of the openbsd development team is contributing because they want to work on some ancient k-car chassis.

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