Re: development news?
I recall waay back on Mar 15 when Gary Kline wrote:
> Sorry, I don't know what is what and where. From one
> to perhaps as many as 5 people were doing at least
> seemingly ``serious work'' on the project. I've lost
> track.
>
> Anyone else know the latest?
As far as I know, I was the last one to brave that path. I didn't get to
spend much time on it though. I have since realized that it will be a lot
more work than I originally thought, because there are some basic paradigm
differences between BSD and Linux. For example, BSD statically links (as
far as I can tell) everything outside of /usr. So /bin, /sbin, etc, they
are all statically linked binaries. In Linux you have /lib and most of it
is dynamically linked. This would be one source of headaches. If it could
be fixed, it would make the kernel/lib dependancies much easier to deal
with though. There is also the difference between /usr/local usages.
The short answer here is that creating something that looks and feels like
Debian but uses a BSD kernel would basically be a port of some Linux
packages, and would contain very little of FreeBSD except the kernel
itself. You've lost a lot of the charateristics of FreeBSD by the time you
do that (maybe that's good, if you're like me and just want Debian with a
different kernel). Like you can't realistically CVSup and 'make world' to
get a newly updated source tree. Whoever is maintaining the Debian-style
packages would have to do that, and they'd have to modify each tree
downloaded to take care of it.
That said though, I have been meaning to post what I did for a while and
if someone is interested in doing something with it then more power to
you, and I'll get it up. It is basically a shotgun port of dpkg and apt
(the potato versions, I think). They work but a few things aren't ported
properly (like start-stop-daemon).
--
Anything anybody can say about America is true.
-- Emmett Grogan
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