NetBSD 1.5ZB

Dahan writes: "I just saw that the development branch of NetBSD is now at version 1.5ZB. A change log is available for those interested. Note that although the title of the page says it's a list of changes from NetBSD 1.5 to 1.6, NetBSD 1.6 is not out yet--the page lists changes that will be in 1.6 whenever it's released. (And when will that be? "When it's ready," of course.) Standard caution about not running development kernels on mission-critical systems applies, although I've been running 1.5ZA on my DEC^H^H^HCompaq Alpha PC164 web/mail/DNS/whatever server for a few months now, and it's been great. And for those of you used to the Linux version numbering scheme and are wondering what all these letters mean, here's an explanation of NetBSD's version numbering."

Comments

Re:NetBSD stopped being useful once I forked OpenB

[Snowfox]

Frankly, I think that NetBSD has reached its endgame. There are only so many platforms you can port to until you have it running on your toaster. And frankly, I think its unprofessional to let things like SMP support or a decent packaging system slide while focusing on porting to platform after deficient platform.

When comparing BSDs, extreme portability is the one thing that's always listed with NetBSD's positive assets. Being able to port quickly is indeed a valuable thing when bootstrapping new or custom hardware, and if NetBSD is uniquely positioned in this regard, it's got some value yet.

Out of curiosity, how real is this advantage? Are there things that make NetBSD more portable than OpenBSD?