From: Theo de Raadt (deraadtcvs.openbsd.org)
Date: Wed Jun 02 2004 - 23:30:03 CDT

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> On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 01:44:13AM -0500, the unit calling itself J Moore wrote:
> > Any possibility that Soekris might be added to the list of supported
> > architectures anytime in the near future?
>
> Forty-eight responses to the original post, and apparently the answer to
> the original question is "No". On the other hand we did see a pretty
> good display of puffed-up egos, and a fair showing of
> pseudo-intellectualism. Unfortunately, I suppose I get credit for that
> since I phrased my question rather poorly.
>
> It appears the opensoekris project is not extremely active as there have
> been no updates for 5 months (and the dark gray-on-black color scheme is
> really hard to read). Due to the regular appearance of threads
> pertaining to Soekris in this list, I wondered if there might be an
> alternative to OpenSoekris, or if the OpenBSD team might be considering
> the addition of a "special distribution" tailored to Soekris hardware.

Sorry, but I have no idea what you are talking about.

At the last pf hackathon, we had 15 Soekris machines. Besides about
2-3 teeny tweaks (noatime on filesystems, mfs /tmp, maybe syslog.conf
modified to interface with syslogc(8) instead).... not one of them was
running anything else more custom. Imagine that! 15 Soekris machines
running without having to be on a "supported architectures" list.
Astounding. Is my ego sounding puffed up now -- is this
pseudo-intellectualism -- or, maybe just maybe, all it took is minimal
administration? If I recall correctly we had a newbie "pf slave"
installing them for us...

Noone seems to tell us what they expect! A special distribution for
the above 2-3 tweaks? Madness. I may have an ego but your melodarama
is killing me. By the way, the first two I listed above both happen
in the same file... it's called /etc/fstab... hope that isn't too
technical.... the other change is clearly documented in the
syslog.conf man page which I hope you are capable of understanding.

Since noone steps up and makes it clear what it is that their soekris
machines *need*... we don't know what to do. And I am not talking about
what you want; I am talking about totally required functionality, and
nothing more, else you can buy a stinking book and learn how to do
machine configuration.

Instead, I fear, there will continue to be a whole bunch of these
twitched-out OpenBSD re-releases, which will then fade into
unmaintained obscurance, or even non-existance... perhaps as their
authors realize every 6 months that their 20-80 tweaks just get in the
way :)

Yes, there are some minor things we might want to handle better, like
the serial console issues, but those are not specific to the Soekris
as any non-i386 serial console person has noticed.

So please tell us what such a "special distribution" would entail. If
it is simply 2-3 commands typed after install, then I'm quite simply
astounded.

ps. In the future, if you feel the need to call us egotistical, you
might want to just keep your trap shut, and go run something else
instead, ok? don't bite the hand that feeds you. thanks a lot.

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