Re: assimilating OpenBSD

[Jeff Sheinberg <jeffsh@erols.com>]

Wartan Hachaturow writes:
 > On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 11:07:31AM -0800, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
 > 
 > > But many of the BSD /bin and /sbin binaries are not truly compatible with
 > > GNU equivalents. So does this mean forcing the Debian packages and Debian
 > > routines (like dpkg pre-installation scripts) to use the BSD tools
 > > instead?
 > 
 > Actaully, we have three ways -- use gnu utils as native,
 > and install them as the base (but in that case I'm not sure that
 > all other BSD stuff will work as expected), install gnu utils
 > as a required package and use g* commands in all dpkg scripts,
 > or hack BSD tools to be compatible with gnu ones.
 > 
 > But I agree that the last way is not an option.
 > Really, I think we have to make some wrappers around file- and
 > find-utils that would care about incompatibilites, and call the
 > needed ones. Yes, that would be slower and kludgy -- but would eliminate the
 > need of editing the exisiting scripts.
 > Hmm.. But we would have to edit them anyway..
 > Actually, this is a problem.
 > When I've been making debhelper port, I've changed calls of "find" and
 > "xargs" to "gfind" and "gxargs", but we should really think about it.
    ^^^^^      ^^^^^

I think you've got it backwards.  This is about `debian-bsd', not
`bsd-debian'.

In general, the GNU tools are upwards compatible with the BSD
ones.

I think that if you do your work with this in mind,

    assume that your are packaging the BSD tools to be installed
    on a native debian system

then you will be headed in the right direction.

Consider the debian sysvinit and file-rc packages, how is it that
they can both be installed on the same debian system
simultaneously? 

Remember, all of the desired features of debian, that are provided
by apt and friends, are only made possible by the individual,
hand-crafting of each and every debian package, to a set of
consistent standards.

IMO, this is the major job at hand with debian-bsd.  It's not the
existing debian packages that need to be ported, they should
essentially work as is.  This is approach that Marcus Brinkmann
is taking with debian-hurd.

Only the essential BSD tools like disklabel, newfs, fsck, etc need
to be packaged as debian packages, at first.  Then when you have a
running debian-bsd system, then you can begin work on the BSD
tools like find, xargs, ls, mv, etc.

-- 
Jeff Sheinberg  <jeffsh@erols.com>