Re: Status of NetBSD port?
On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 12:20:20PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote:
> I see that mjg has already answered this to a fair degree; therefore, I'll
> mostly only be commenting on things he didn't cover in detail, that I
> happen to know.
Thanks for your replies. I guess the one question I have right now is:
How can I dive in and start playing with the system? Or is that even
possible now, given the state of the archive?
> As said, there are two answers. For the 'native' port, we have the
> following things either officially or almost-officially packaged:
>
> netbsd-make (NetBSD native make/pmake/bmake variant, needed for building )
> netbsd-libc (libc, libm, et al kernel-source-current (aka CVS src/sys )
>
> The first two are known to build in a chroot environment and produce valid
> and useable Debian packages. The latter is still being packaged, and may
> need a kernel-package style helper package; the main holdup on this is the
> issue over introducing that much source code under a 4-clause BSD license
> from a source known to care about advertising clauses.
What component exactly is the one with the BSD-plus-advertising?
> Yes. Less steadily than at times, but still actively. I'm also working on
> the naming issue with TNF and other folks, which is a necessary long-term
> issue to resolve.
What's TNF?
> > 3. Where could I best contribute to the port? Would an autobuilder be
> > useful? (I do have experience running those; I used to run the one for
> > our Alpha port.)
>
> It would be, once we can get one even chroot-installed, prefferably
> real-installed; while I had very good success at squashing bug problems on
> my old box, and getting things basically workable, it ate so much time (due
> to bootstrapping a port always being time-intensive) that I mostly only
> ever got around to recompiling things if a newer version showed up in a
> dependancy of some sort.
I completely understand that. I don't have experience with a port in
quite the early stage that this one is, but at the time I ran an
autobuilder on Alpha, we indeed had that problem since packages were
build when people felt like it.
To me, a key benefit of Debian GNU/*NetBSD is the Debian userland and
software already ported to the Debian .deb system. I have been looking
at the NetBSD pkgsrc system this week, and have basically concluded that
a lot of the software that I want an am accustomed to in Debian is
either missing or too outdated to be useful. It would actually be
easier for me, long term, to help the Debian port to NetBSD, I think.
:-)
> We have a wishlist ftp-archive bug open to get space, but that almost
> certainly won't be resolved until we can show the world (or at least
> debian-devel) a compelling demonstration that we have our act together,
> and can actually get, for example, an entire base system installed and
> functioning, using debian-installer. Until then, we're unlikely to have
I'd suggest that debian-installer is not necessarily a prerequisite
here (hurd-i386 doesn't use it yet, for instance), but yeah, I can see
the rest. OTOH, hurd seems to have gotten space at a pretty early
stage. We may at least be able to get some space on some other server
like quantz. If you'd like, I could ask Wichert about that. (I already
have some major stuff there, such as my 1GB Arch repository of the Linux
kernel source with every version since 0.01 <grin>)
> Anyone wanting to help Lars with the wishlist bugs on Enemies of Carlotta
> would probably speed up getting the lightbearer.com archive back, so if
> you happen to like python, that might, oddly enough, be very useful. :)
I do happen to like Python[1]. However, I'm not presently in the market
for a new mailing list manager, so I'm afraid I'll just have to help in
more direct ways :-)
Thanks,
John
[1] http://quux.org/devel/offlineimap
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