Re: The subject is starting to lose meaning
dan writes:
> It seems to me that you have forgotten that I was a Debian user for many
> moons. I used hamm when it just became stable all the way until a few
> months after potato made the leap to glibc2.1
>
> I'm quite aware of what the "Debian way" is, but I doubt that many
> of you know what the "FreeBSD way" is.
>
> And I last ran debian three weeks ago to see if it was much different
> with FreeBSD experience under my belt, I upgraded to 2.2.6 or something
> as well as apt-get upgrade to potato.
>
> As for that install two packages at once thing, carefully written scripts
> or a user with clue can prevent that. It'd be sad for that to be the
> biggest issue why you'd like to fork the OS; if you'd like to add
> tools to pkg_delete to make the user have to force an installation over
> an older version, go right ahead and save us all a lot of work and headache.
>
> -Dan
No, I think there's a lot more to Debian than that, especially in ease of
administration. And as I said before, _I_ don't see why there should be a
fork, as such. Mostly, that should be up to the FreeBSD project. Like any
other package: normally patches are sent to upstream authors. Of course, if
patches are specific to Debian, some authors don't want them. Now if
FreeBSD doesn't want to accept patches, they could cause there to be a
fork. Keep in mind also that the Linux kernel package has some minor
patches applied to it, but no-one says we're forking Linux. And those
changes are usually just applied to the next kernel release.
I don't see why I can't just configure vendor branches in CVS, update from
FreeBSD and make whatever changes are necessary to build as Debian
packages. No need to fork, since I'm not really planning on doing any true
independent development. Rather, I'd plan on just updating the package and
doing a merge.
Probably the biggest reason I'm interested in this, is that I want to see
Debian able to run on kernels other than Linux. I don't expect to be able
to use the Hurd in production for a long time, if ever. The FreeBSD kernel,
OTOH, should be quite useful to people like me. I have several Debian
systems running in production, and I really need a volume manager. The
Linux LVM isn't in the kernel yet, and I need it now. It would be nice to
have the choice of kernels under Debian, which I'm already using for
everything else.
Also, I would like to work on tools to deal with source package dependacies
and CVS. These are things that could help with FreeBSD and Debian both, and
would help to make Debian/BSD possible _without_ needing to make it a fork.
Of course, I can't do much until I can get time to setup my hardware. (I'll
be dedicating a couple boxes to this.) Is anyone else really active now?
---Nathan Hawkins
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