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Staying Current with NetBSD
BSDForums writes "Open source never stands still. Even the flexible and mature BSDs are continuing to evolve. In this article, Michael Lucas looks at the NetBSD upgrade process, demonstrating the most common steps to stay abreast of the current source code. This article isn't a comprehensive tutorial that covers every possible situation; rather, it covers the most common situation: updating your source with CVS, building that source code, and installing it on the build machine."
Except for the (supposed) stability issue, it probably doesn't matter to if anonymous users connect by pserver or ssh. Also remember that there are developers using CVS also, and they probably would not like the passwords for their accounts (with commit priviledges) being sent plain-text.
Obviously the encryption isn't important, but ssh does more than encryption--it also makes sure that you're actually talking to the server you think you're talking to. With ssh, you can avoid someone redirecting your connection to another machine and sending you trojaned source files.
That's a fair accessment. To be honest, BSD is mostly a hobby system.
You better go and tell that to Yahoo! and all those ISP's who have server farms running nothing but FreeBSD. You better tell all those embedded companies who have mistakenly chosen NetBSD over some less well featured, closed source alternative. And all those people running critical edge systems (firewalls, routers, etc.) on OpenBSD - better tell them to switch as well. And those amateurs at Apple, what the hell are they doing running a BSD based operating system?
Your post is the most ill informed rubbish I've seen in oh, a couple of hours. Well, since I last checked SplashSnot anyway.
Chris
To be honest, BSD is mostly a hobby system.
Not sure what you mean here, anymore than Linux is just a hobby system. Linus doesn't sell anything, it's tken from him and the maintainers and packaged by others.
Commercial support for BSD isn't what it is for Linux, thats true. If thats your only criterion for comparison, I guess it is "hobby", much like Linux was. The reason for this is more accident than anything; Linux didn't have to fight a lawsuit over the UNIX name. Linus himself has said that he would have used BSD if it wasn't encumbered at the time. Instead he made Linux.
FreeBSD does have a longer history. For years it had a better VM, so much so that Linux binaries would run better on FreeBSD under load than on a Linux system. Besides a stabler VM, the scheduler is more mature, and they don't tend to do huge changes in the middle of a stable branch (the VM and scheduler changes in the 2.4 branch) nor did they have a file system corruption bug in a stable branch.
There's only one problem I have with the article, it shows how to track -current, the alpha/beta branch of NetBSD. (As -current is with all other *BSDs). It did not show how to track 1.6-STABLE (using "-r netbsd-1-6" in your cvs command line.) It should have mentioned that as most people just want the latest bugfixes and upgrades rather than testing what is going to become 2.0 with all of the changes that implies.