On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 02:21:58PM -0500, Adam Heath wrote: > On Mon, 5 May 2003, Joel Baker wrote: > > > The 'GNU' in Debian GNU/Linux (or GNU/*, really) refers to userland, not > > libc. On the flip side, I don't think any of the non-GNU ports have any > > problem with providing, where possible, workalikes for things provided by > > GNU libc. (Honestly, some things much more fundamental than getent are not > > the same - particularly locales; at some point, we'll have to find a sane > > and rational way to address this). > > libc is userland. Fine. Provide me with a better term to split things out, if you want to keep that for strictly kernel-vs-user. I can compile GNU coreutils on top of nearly any libc+kernel and have it work in some reasonable fashion, as long as said kernel+libc provides a reasonably sane environment (attempting to fufill POSIX, for example, usually suffices, or close to it). GNU coreutils runs just fine on 'netbsd-kernel-image-1.6' + 'libc12' (aka netbsd-libc); probably 80% of the main archive that's been tried so far has compiled more or less out of the box, cleanly, and *most* of the changes to the rest have either been minor, or have involved the toolchain (which is never minor). To me, that meets the (mostly unwritten) sanity requirements. Quote Policy chapter and verse that specifies Linux, or GNU libc, as being requirements for Debian - otherwise, the intent of the message remains the same: "don't assume stuff shipped from glibc is available unless you declare an explicit (Build-)Depend on the proper libc packages, and NOT just the virtual packages libc / libc-dev, or the common build requirements". Again, if someone wants to provide the reputedly trivial code to provide this from Debian's netbsd-libc package (and if it's agreed it should come from libc, and not somewhere else), I'm *happy* to include it. Hell, if folks are convinced it belongs in libc, but don't want to write it, I'll put it on the TODO and get to it when I can. Claiming that Debian's choice to listen to RMS and add 'GNU' to the name because it uses glibc on most ports, and a GNU utility set on pretty much all of them that I know of should imply that all ports must use GNU libc would be... ludicrous. -- Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org>
Attachment:
pgpUD6K5YfFQP.pgp
Description: PGP signature