On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 06:29:18AM +1000, Rudolph Pereira wrote: > On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 09:42:16PM +0100, Dan Walrond wrote: > > >From what I can see, as these ports are meant to be Debian ported to > > *BSD the core of the OS should be as much of *BSD as possible. So the > > ports should be using the BSD's libc hacked to work with the Debian > > userland. I feel that the Debian/*BSD ports will have more respect if > > it's using BSD's libc rather than glibc. As what's the point for porting > > Debian to *BSD if it's mainly a GNU core. User take up of the port will > > be greater if it's something different from Debian GNU/Linux. And I feel > > it'll make Debian more of the Universial OS if these ports use libc. As > > if you're wanting the benafits of glibc then the kernel should be Linux > > or the HURD. > I agree, fwiw. > > On that topic, is there a list/page/something somewhere with the goals of this > project? As far as I'm concerned, I want to work towards having a > debian-packaging system on the *bsds, rather than anything else. That's > the thing I miss most on bsd systems, rather than the lack of true-gnu > tools (for the most part, if I need them I can install them from ports, > or they're already part of the base system, or the base system's > versions work well enough). 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. :) 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. 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 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 :) Now, certainly, some things may need to be *additionally* packaged; netbsd-libc has a Build-Dependancy on netbsd-make, for example, because it's intimately tied with NetBSD's derivative of pmake/bmake, and can't build with normal GNU make. On the flip side, the netbsd-make package doens't install 'make', or even offer itself as an alternative, because Policy says (and sanity requires) that 'make' be able to handle gmake style Makefiles (whether that means 'gmake' or something else). -- Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>
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