Re: Glibc-based Debian GNU/KNetBSD
On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 02:16:04AM +0100, allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr wrote:
> Debian developers are mostly GNU/Linux users and are likely to use
> GNU specific features, and not ready to stop this usage for a port
> that have yet to happen.
The vast majority of code shipped by Debian is not Debian-specific and
should not be Linux specific. In those cases, failing to build on NetBSD
can be reasonably considered a bug (in most cases, there's no good
reason to use glibc or Linux specific code) or suggest a useful feature
that's missing in the NetBSD libc. I've met little resistance from
people regarding the first of these, and the NetBSD folks have been
extremely happy to add things that fall into the latter.
> So your best bet to get your port released is to provide an environment
> as similar as the GNU/Linux so that most packages will build out of
> the box. Using glibc and GNU tools is a big step in this direction.
I think using GNU tools is certainly likely to happen - I think it would
be hard to reasonably argue that it's a Debian system unless ls --color
works...
Glibc is, I think, less important. From the packages I've tried, very
few failures have been due to glibc/libc issues - frankly, I've had more
trouble with packages that notice that they're building on NetBSD and so
want to produce manpages in cat format, which is something that's true
of any port.
> Coming with a distribution with less feature/efficiency than the original
> *BSD flavour is not a problem as long as said feature are not part of
> the release criteria.
Uh, of course it is. Producing software that sucks but happens to
satisfy release criteria does little to benefit Debian, our users or the
free software community. Doing it right is more important, even if that
means it takes longer.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
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