Re: Debian BSD.. cool idea
I recall waay back on Feb 01 when Nathan Hawkins wrote:
> Personally, I'm not interested in creating another BSD. (Not in the sense
> of Free/Open/Net BSD.) I'd just like to integrate parts of FreeBSD (kernel
> and closely related programs) into Debian. So it could simply be the
> FreeBSD source code patched to fit into the Debian filesystem and package
> structure. Rather more likely, there'll be numerous patches... :)
That's pretty much what it looks like it would be, from what I've seen
anyway..
> I think enthusiasm would be premature.
I think enthusiasm is what it might end up taking to get people moving on
the project =D
> There's nothing getting done, so far
> as I know. (I'm waiting on some hardware that I should have had back in
> early December. I don't know much about what anyone else is doing, because
> this list has mostly been discussing politics. :-( )
See earlier message, I did some playing around with dpkg and apt on
FreeBSD 4.0, and they seem portable enough. It takes a few important
changes (and the usage of gmake) but it works out ok. The only thing I
haven't figured out yet is how to make mmap() work in apt. It appears to
be giving problems.
Once those things are worked out, some more tools can be ported using the
same method and people ought to be able to start playing with compiling
Debian packages, and creating Debian packages from the FreeBSD bin
distribution.
I know there are many more details, but I'm taking the gung-ho see how far
we can get strategy at the moment.
> It's obvious that only
> a minority are interested in this from either side, but I believe there's
> great potential to make both systems better.
It seems to me that one prudent way of advancing is to try to make the
minimum number of changes to either system independent of the system
itself (few Debian patches as possible, few BSD patches as possible) and
then let people roll their own as they like. The base distro might include
the basic install (like the Debian pre-dselect install), plus a few
packages for things like gcc and dpkg devel tools, and then you'd go from
there.
This way, you don't waste disk space on the Debian server with Yet Another
Recompile (I've actually seen this argument on devel) but it is still
possible to setup a system.
One cool thing to do would be to incorporate patches from Ports where
available. I don't know the feasability of this because of licensing, but
I'm assuming it's ok since FreeBSD does much the same thing with the
pre-compiled packages for download. Anyway, there are patches in ports to
make a given program compile on FreeBSD. There are also patches with a
Debian source package. Might be cool to have a util that looks for both
and tries to make a FreeBSD-compatable Debian package. Ok, that's pretty
far fetched but I'm brainstorming again (out of politics for me!)
--
And on the eighth day, we bulldozed it.
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