Have you ever had one of those days where nothing seems to go right? Like the fictional character from the old “Pebbles & Bam Bam” cartoon “Bad Luck Schleprock” where a cloud follows you around and everything you touch turns to… well crap?

I think I had a day like that yesterday.

It all started when I read a posting on Undeadly.org announcing that OpenBSD was dropping support for the VAX platform:

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160309192510

As I read the posting, especially after seeing the part where it said “after much internal discussion”, I groaned. Literally groaned out loud.

You see, if we roll the clock back to January, I had picked up a dirt cheap VAXstation 3100 on eBay and was working on getting OpenBSD-current up and running on it. When I looked at my favorite mirror, however, I couldn’t find packages in the “snapshot” subdirectory for the VAX architecture.

Being the n00b that I am, I posted to the misc@ mailing list and asked the question that I fear started this whole snowball rolling: “I can’t find -current packages for the VAX, are we dropping support in 5.9 for it?”

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=145357927822796&w=2

Really quickly, someone answered back that we weren’t building packages on that platform because it took so long and that we typically build them near the end of the release cycle. No big deal, I went on with my day.

Well, if you follow the thread (and I clearly wasn’t doing so), it goes on until we see Theo weigh in sometime later and… I fear I was the guy who accidentally kill the VAX support in OpenBSD. I’m like the people who keep killing Kenny on South Park.

RIP OpenBSD VAX