Re: FW: testing, testing
On Mon, Jul 12, 1999 at 05:58:56PM -0700, Brent Fulgham wrote:
> 1. Provide a Debian "BSD Kernel" package.
> The obvious advantage here is that we drastically limit our scope to
> producing a package that can co-exist with an existing Debian GNU/Linux
> installation and provide a BSD kernel. I'm not really sure what the
> advantages over a Linux Kernel distribution would be. We would be relying
> on BSD's Linux-compatibility layers, which may or may not be perfect (I have
> no personal knowledge). We would have limited project scope, and a limite
> amount of resources needed.
As well as the kernel there's a bunch of kernel-specific utilities I expect,
like most of /sbin. Anything which sets things up inside the kernel,
like networking (ifconfig, route, etc), file systems (mount, fsck), etc.
This seems like a reasonable idea for a project and shouldn't be too much
work (compared to a whole port).
> 2. Provide a Debian BSD "port".
[...]
> assistance. But why produce this port? The main advantage I see for a BSD
> user is that they would have access to the Debian package system, which
That's true, they would. An idea I have been pushing a bit is to have dpkg
running on FreeBSD to manage /compat/linux (or perhaps /compat/debian).
Perhaps standard linux-i386 packages could be installed onto the system
(using dpkg/dselect). It would only be necessary to port and hack dpkg to do
this.
I suspect that FreeBSD users are happy with their basic userspace tools
and won't be too impressed with "Debian [GNU/]FreeBSD" having the GNU ones.
> up/maintaining a BSD system. Gary points out that there are many Linux
> device drivers and libraries that are not necessarily available on BSD.
> This would obviously be a lot of work, but is potentially a very satisfying
> and lasting contribution to the Free Software community.
Well, that might be beyond the scope of a Debian project. We don't have
the Linux kernel now, so I don't see why we would get into hacking the
FreeBSD kernel in the future. Still, no reason why we couldn't.
Most of this effort is based on the premise that the FreeBSD kernel
is better than the Linux kernel. Unfortunately it's hard to comment on
that without causing a flamewar :-)
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB (ex-VK3TYD).
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