Re: glibc

[Steve Price <sprice@hiwaay.net>]

On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Per Lundberg wrote:

# As someone told me, I asked on hackers@freebsd.org if there was a glibc
# port to FreeBSD. Of course they started the traditional ranting about how
                   ^^^^^^^^^
Of course?

# poor GNU getopt is and stuff like that, but I managed to find out these
# things:

This is not intended as flamebait.  I'm just tired of seeing people
come away from conversations with ruffled feathers and calling out
out the other party for having a difference of opinion.  And this
is not directed at you since I'll no doubt be talking to Alex about it
too soon. :)  Please don't make generalizations about a whole community
of people that you haven't met because of what what one person with an
opinion said.  Thanks.

# * There doesn't seem to be a glibc port to FreeBSD, so we will probably
# have to do it ourselves, if we find it necessary. (see below)
# 
# * GNU getopt is ported and even in the ports collection. What I think we
# should do, for now, is to make a "cameleont-libc" for FreeBSD, based on
# the native libc and with getopt added. This way, we won't have to modify a
# lot of packages, and we will be able to get a working system setup even
# before we do port glibc (if it becomes necessary, but it might not).

Actually I think Warner's suggestion has a lot of merit.  Put
getopt_long and friends that are GNU add-ons that aren't in
some of the other libcs in libgnu.a and use BSD's libc.  Yes,
I was the one that suggested using the libgnugetopt port.  See
my post of the dpkg port to this list for an example of how
trivially easy it is to deploy.

# What do you think? Am I on the wrong track here?

I think you are on the right track. :)

Would someone with more experience with dpkg be willing to take
a FreeBSD port and .deb'ize it for me.  There are ~2500 programs
in the Ports Collection that have already been ported to FreeBSD.
Making .debs of them and introducing more FreeBSD people to the
concept would probably be the most bang for the buck short term.

-steve