Re: "Debian Within a Darwin System"

[Scott Henson <scotth@csee.wvu.edu>]

Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> writes:
> On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Scott Henson wrote:
>> There is of course the problem of packages possibly not knowing about
>> the --root switch and they would still look for their conf files under
>> /etc, but that may also be a bug and there may be some way of getting
>> dpkg to tell the packages about the new root.  At least that is how I
>
> I don't think anything except dpkg honors the --root flag. It's just a way to
> tell dpkg to extract the files at a different place, not to tell the
> applications to start looking for files at a different place.

Yes, but there might be a way to change that to make packages aware of
a different installation root, else we could use chroot and various
hacks as you said before.

>> would go about doing it in the easiest possible way.  It would require
>> you to alter your path and set your ld variable or some such, but it
>> lets you run the program without being root, though you probably still
>> need root to install(doesn't dpkg enforce this?).
>
> Dpkg needs root because it needs to write to / and to /var/lib/dpkg.
Yes thats right.

But in any case, does anyone here actively use Darwin.  Can anyone
comment on how hard or easy it would be to port Debian to that kernel?
I guess the first thing that anyone wanting to start such a port would
have to do is talk to the Debian k{Net,Free}BSD people to see how far
a long they are and what the procedure to start such a beast would
be.  

-- 
Scott Henson <scotth@csee.wvu.edu>