Re: FreeBSD patch for dpkg?
firstly, thanks for the explanation
On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 03:08:23PM -0600, Joel Baker wrote:
> What there is, is on the Ports page, mostly. Keep in mind that there are
> (at least) two separate efforts that are being kept track of on here: the
> (stagnant?) FreeBSD port, and the (stalled on GCC fixes) NetBSD port.
>
> There are three core decisions that are made for any possible BSD port:
>
> 1) Which BSD?
> 2) Which libc?
> 3) Which userland?
>
> These have been debated long, hard, and mostly fruitlessly; the existing
> ports all exist because one or more people quit debating and started
> *doing*.
>
> Personally, I wanted NetBSD (for portability), native libc (for sanity),
> and Debian (GNU-ish) userland (for compatibility). The FreeBSD folks
> prefer(ed) GNU libc for question #2; which is fine, since I'm not working
> on the FreeBSD port myself. :)
I've looked at the debian/freebsd pages, and as you say above, it seems
stagnant - the only link to something to try is to satie.debian.org :)
otoh, you seem to suggest that the freebsd port is preferring gnu libc,
which may indicate that the ports page is so out of date as to be
misleading (they say they will be using freebsd's libc).
>
> A summary of *my* goal for the NetBSD/i386 port (which is probably as
> close as you'll get to a single goal, given there appear to be only 2 or
> maybe 3 of us working on it actively right now) would be:
>
> A system which anyone familiar with Debian/Linux can sit down at and use
> or administer, without significant "gotchas" anywhere they can be avoided,
> with absolutely minimal extra effort. I'll grant that some of the stuff
> they'll know will be Linux-centric (say, some of /proc), but as far as the
> actual Debian tools and userland go, you should be able to install any
> package that isn't absolutely Linux-exclusive and have it work exactly like
> it would on any other Debian system.
>
Excellent - we appear to have the same set of goals :)
> If I just wanted the package tools, that'd be easy - dpkg and APT are
> already patched, and have been for ages (and dpkg is now in the offiical
> source, even; APT should be with the next release).
I suppose what I meant was the packaging/build infrastructure and all
the goodness of debian+bsd, which boils down to your paragraph before
last I think
>
> I don't care about GNU, precisely, however; the parts of the Debian
> userland that aren't GNU should not be arbitrarily replaced by GNU tools,
> any more than we should arbitrarily use the BSD tsort rather than the
> Debian-packaged GNU one (for one example, that breaks some build things :)
I agree with this too - from my pov (albeit probably an uninformed one)
replacing the native libc with gnu libc appears almost unnecessary, and
creates a lot of work
ok, given the above, is there some way to work out:
- which subgroup has what goals/ideals
- who's working on what
- what there is to do
?
The real "problem" is that I'd like to work on a debian/freebsd port
(mostly because I am familiar and like freebsd, and have some machines
running freebsd that I think could benefit from it), and I have similar
goals to you (apart from the netbsd part), but most importantly don't
appear to have the same goals as the debian/freebsd people; lastly, I
don't know the status of the project closest to what I'd like to achieve
(or even what that project is), what there is to do, and what there is
that I could do.
Do you have any suggestions/answers? Does anyone here have them?
thanks
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