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klibertp • yesterday at 8:28 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Installation instructions:

    ftp https://raw.githubusercontent.com/segaboy/vulkan-netbsd/main/scripts/setup-env.sh
       !^^^^^!
That's... a bit unorthodox. FreeBSD has a `fetch`[1] utility for this, I wasn't aware NetBSD puts that in `ftp`[2].

Interesting choice. I wonder what led to it.

[1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?fetch

[2] https://man.netbsd.org/ftp.1

Replies

yjftsjthsd-h • yesterday at 10:07 PM

I dunno, that feels very BSD to me. Presumably, they had a ftp utility first, and then when somebody wanted to download files over http they looked around and decided that the obvious thing to do was to add it to the existing file transfer/download program. Same as continuing to add functions to ifconfig rather than inventing a new ip tool.

iberator • yesterday at 8:37 PM

Oldest supported machine for NetBSD is VAX 780 from 1978(!!!). One of the first system supporting mmu, 32 bit cpu, virtual memory etc etc

This machine is so slow that it takes a lot of time to generate ssh keys etc. We talking here hours hehe

NetBSD is known to support like 60 architectures - many of them low end embedded systems: so ftp AS A CHOICE (you have other options!) is very smart and easy

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