Re: Status of NetBSD port?
On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 12:36:05PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 05:16:42PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > The second effort was started up by Robert Millan and uses glibc. I'm
> > not clear on how this interacts with stuff that's more tightly bound to
> > the kernel, but I'd expect it to contain at least as much GNU userland
> > as the other one.
>
> This confuses me; http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/porting.html doesn't
> mention that glibc runs on any BSD platform.
I'm not sure what the state of the *BSD patches is in terms of
integration with upstream source. There's an alioth project on this,
IIRC.
> But then it brings up the question: say I want to install Debian
> GNU/NetBSD to do some experimentation. How do I choose which option I
> want? There Debian NetBSD port page doesn't seem to differentiate.
Personally, I think the NetBSD libc choice is more pragmatic and easier
to deal with - I'd expect Robert to disagree :) The port page only
refers to the native libc port. That probably ought to be updated.
> > Ha :) An autobuilder would certainly be useful, but currently the main
> > trick would be installing one. My previous hacked install system isn't
> > going to be much use at the moment.
>
> I have no problem with installing NetBSD on a machine, then untarring or
> unpacking some .debs into a chrooted area, and going from there. What
> about the "experimental install floppies" from October 2002?
Yeah, that's probably going to be saner in the near future. The
"Experimental install floppies" ran the NetBSD installer, and then at
the last moment ran debootstrap, but never worked desperately well...
> > The ucam.org repository should probably be considered a historical
> > artifact at this point - I should really lose it and update the website.
>
> In that case, it appears there are no repositories at all (the
> lightbearer.com one appears unreachable). Is that correct?
Yeah. Joel moved over to using NetBSD CVS for sanity reasons, so the
older stuff wasn't really useful - I'd guess he has a personal
repository, but possibly nowhere useful to put it at the moment. Joel?
> > "Official" infrastructure is likely to be waiting until the ftpmasters
> > decide what the best approach to the potential proliferation of
> > architectures is.
>
> Makes sense, but maybe we can hurry them along (heh).
Heh. I'm in no major hurry - letting the -amd64 situation sort itself
out first, and get sarge out the door.
> Speaking of the toolchain... given that gcc is used directly by the
> NetBSD folks, what exactly is the pain in this department? Couldn't we
> just build our .debs of it the same way they build and install it?
I'd been using Debian source of gcc with minor patches. gcc-3.3 has
decent NetBSD support without patching.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
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