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Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 17:30:27 -0500 (EST)
From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu>
cc: "David O'Brien" <obrien@NUXI.com>, Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>,
        cvs-all@freefall.freebsd.org, CVS-committers@freefall.freebsd.org,
        cvs-user@freefall.freebsd.org, ports@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: cvs commit:  src/contrib/gcc/config/i386 freebsd-elf.h freebsd.h
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On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Chuck Robey wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, John Fieber wrote:
> 
> > True, but the installed base -current is probably a lot smaller
> > than various stable versions.  It is a shame that many ports
> > arrogantly disregard the substantial installed base of
> > "pre-current" when supporting them is often a trivial #ifdef
> > patch.  I was annoyed to find that the apache port doesn't even
> > compile on something as recent as 2.2-BETA!  Apache is certainly
> > a port of great interest to the "legacy" installed base. 
> > 
> > There are ports that simply won't fly on old versions; for
> > example stuff that requires a reasonably modern c++ compiler, but
> > many simply don't have a good excuse for being -current only. 
> 
> I'm going to comment one last time, then drop it.  Your reason for not
> wanting to use the detection of __FreeBSD__ | __NetBSD__ | __OpenBSD__ is
> because it's not elegant enough for you.  I can agree with the fact that

Pardon me?

My only part in this conversation was addressing that
it is often a very small line between a freebsd-current only
port, and one that works on old versions as well.

I *never* expressed *any* opinions, or even *mentioned* the
various mechanisims for determining the version of FreeBSD at
build time.  I don't even really care much what the mechanisim is
so long as ports don't fall over on older versions of FreeBSD for
insanely trivial quirks like rlim_t in the current apache port.

-john