Re: The project
According to Per Lundberg:
> On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, Gary Kline wrote:
>
> > So far, just some agreements on a few basics, such as using
> > the BSD (FBSD) Linux-``emultation'' rather than mis-invest
> > endless months in re-inventing wheels.
>
> To be honest, I think that's a bad idea. The Linux support is (at least in
> FreeBSD) rather limited, and even if it worked it wouldn't feel as good
> as a "real" system.
Here is where I have no real bias. Since the xwp (WordPerfect-8)
works on both this FBSD-2.2.8 and on my experimental FBSD-3.2
systems, the linux compat isn't much of as issue ((to me!)).
What I'd really like to see is the superiority of a FBSD
kernel with the superiority of the tons of the best freeware
from GNU. (Plus any other kind of open-source software,
of course.) I'd really like to see the Linux drivers integrated
into the BSD kernel... but this isn't very clear because some
people have a strong bias one way or the other.
>
> But on the other hand, nothing stops us from doing both. Making a "Linux
> on BSD"-distribution will probably not take much time at all. Making a
> "real" Debian/BSD will take some longer, but most packages compile right
> out of the box. What I think will take longest is porting glibc (which is
> something that should be done anyway), but any experienced glibc hacker
> could probably do it in a weekend.
Ask the hackers@freebsd.org list if the port hasn't already
been done. It may very well have been... . And yes, it isn't
that major a hack to do it entirely from scratch. --In fact,
most things-GNU port over easily.
>
> I think, however, the project will benefit a lot from this, since it will
> require some changing of the architecture handling, which the Hurd port
> will need to have anyway. (I think Marcus Brinkmann wrote a proposal on
> this subject on -private or -devel a while ago)
>
Yes, I think so, too. Whether we need Yet-Another-BSD is
pure flame-bait; my take on the matter is that the world
would benefit endlessly if people could learn to comprimise
enough to cooperate on a full-blown DebianBSD.
> > I'd like people to begin outlining their own ideas about
> > what steps come first, second, third, and Nth-1. What
> > are your ideas?
>
> I can give a short brief on what I've been doing so far.
>
> I started with a freshly installed FreeBSD 3.2 system. The standard
> distribution of FreeBSD sucks (IMO of course, but since this is a Debian
> list I think most people will agree), so I started compiling packages of
> my own. The first package was - naturally - dpkg. It took some work
> ('sysinfo' was missing in the FreeBSD libc), but I had working binaries of
> dpkg and the rest up in an hour or so (and most of that time was
> compilation time).
Do you have a working dpkg that could serve as a port to
FBSD? Steve Price (who is on the list) said that he has
one almost ready to go. Yours, perhaps??
Anyhow, if you would send me the source (or pointer to it),
I'll see if it builds. Send a few cookbook instructions and
I'll see if all the GNU suites just-drop-in. :-)
>
> Anyway, with a working dpkg that could generate and install packages, I
> started doing what else I thought I could need. The following packages
> compiled with no or little patching:
>
> fileutils
> shellutils
> textutils
> findutils
> make
> patch
We've got patch and make (gmake); our make is really pmake,
the Berkeley parallel make. BSD may have the others in the
ports tree. I know that virtually everything was a drop-in
on my SunOS at work. I compiled, put stuff into
/home/users/kline/bin and it works.
>
> ...and some more (I have unfortunately no access to my home box from
> here). The things we need that I had problems with are:
>
> binutils (the problem was that the make process defaulted to a.out)
> gcc (same for this, and is probably easy solved)
Isn't this just a flag like -ELF or the like? This is something
I need to understand better....
>
> The big thing was, of course, glibc. It seems the port that once was done
> to 4.4BSD is rather incomplete (almost all of the system specific stuff
> seemed to be missing), so it's probably easier to start over from the
> beginning. Anyhow, as I said, it's definitely doable. With the BSD libc
> sources installed, it's just a matter of writing a bunch of system call
> files.
>
> Any volunteer? :)
>
For the next several months I've got little to 0.0 time to
get into this. But check with the hackers list first. Or
post a note to questions@freebsd.org; somebody there knows
the details.
gary
>
--
Gary D. Kline kline@tao.thought.org Public service Unix
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