Re: HURD/Linux/BSD* ... Loosing focus.
On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 07:51:31PM -0400, Jack Howarth wrote:
> How exactly do the HURD and BSD* releases fit into
> the future releases. Will the next release past woody
> attempt to release on all those OS's as well as Linux?
> Or will each OS become an independent release of its own?
> That is will there be a testing-linux, testing-hurd and
> testing-bsd next time around such that none of the testing*
> branches can impact the other when they freeze?
> Jack
The current ports covered by this statement (those of which I am aware are:
hurd-i386, netbsd-i386, freebsd-i386, netbsd-sparc, and at least some work
on an openbsd flavor which I *think* is i386) are all basically working
independantly towards being releaseable, though many of them share a lot of
resources (build machines, developers, knowlege, mailing lists) and some of
them share issues (like filesystem layouts, arch support in the packaging
system).
The only thing which is endemic to all of them is "They aren't based on the
traditional combinaton for Debian of a Linux kernel and GNU libc" (the Hurd
has glibc but not Linux; the BSD flavors, so far, have all chosen to go
with their native libc setups, and at least the OpenBSD port seems aimed at
having the OpenBSD userland, for the most part).
However, all of them are, at heart, "ports of debian". That means that they
share the same space as "i386", "sparc", "hppa", and the other release
architectures. The fact that none of those are prefixed with "linux" (as in
"linux-i386", "linux-sparc", etc) is largely from the simple fact that up
until now, there wasn't anything else to share the namespace.
There will only be "testing", as there has been, and those architectures
which are ready for release when Woody+1 goes out the door will be the ones
that get released - whether that's NetBSD-on-i386, Linux-on-SuperH, or
Jam-on-Toast.
However, there's a really huge amount of work to be done, to get any of
the non-Linux ports into place; all of the normal work of bootstrapping a
new port, plus the work of trying to carefully extend the Debian tools to
be able to cope with what they need to, and not break all of the existing
things in the process. Much of it is on the shoulders of the porters, some
of it is shared by the tool maintainers and infrastructure maintainers.
I would, personally, hope that Woody+1 *doesn't* take so long to release
that the netbsd-i386 arch is ready for it, but if it takes as long as Woody
did, hey, it might. We'll find out when it comes time for the next release
maintainer to take a census.
--
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
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