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Re: Some questions about the port



Hi,

Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> >> About the topic "Why not a BSD libc?" he wrote:  "Adapting the libc to  
> >> the kernel is way less work than patching thousands of packages to work  
> >> with another libc, too."
> >>
> >> I wonder why that is so complicate.  As far as I know FreeBSD offers  
> >> many of our packages, too.  So wouldn't it has been possible to take  
> >> some of their patches?  Or do you just thought, it would be easier for  
> >> Debian to patch the libc, instead of getting several thousand packages  
> >> patched by their respectice maintainers?
> >
> >I think, it's just the last thing. I'm just not sure if this counts as
> >much as it did years ago (2001/2002) when Debian GNU/FreeBSD failed
> >and one of the reasons was the BSD libc to my knowledge.
> 
> Yes, but FreeBSD comes with a base system, whereas Debian comes
> with a bunch of GNU packages.

That doesn't look like a reason for me.

> The FSF likes to do Vendor lock-in,

I wouldn't call it that way. But I don't want to have a license
philosophy discussion here and now. I'm quite happy that Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD is quite free of them.

> and you have a bazaar of developers

Yeah, very positive, that! ;-)

> not looking past the corner of their own table.

Some of them possibly, but surely not all. And btw., you could say
that from a lot of BSD people, too. :-)

> Furthermore, things such as the shared library system work different
> between, for example, GNU (Linux, kFreeBSD, Hurd), FreeBSD, Solaris,
> OpenBSD, MirBSD even has a subtly different one... and things like
> dh_* and dpkg-* depend heavily on the interna of those. This is but
> one example.

Now that's a reason! Thanks for that explanation. Feel free to add
that part of your mail to the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD FAQ in the wiki. If
not, I'll probably add it somewhen in the future.

> So, porting the Debian system to a different OS/kernel is really
> only feasible using (e)glibc, as sad as that is.

One man's joy is another man's sorrow. [German: Des einen Freud ist
des anderen Leid.] (SCNR)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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