On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 05:11:47PM +0100, Toni Mueller wrote:
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> On Wed, 16.03.2005 at 15:23:42 +0000, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> > I wrote:
> > >Btw, why, or how, do other projects with much fewer users and also much
> > >fewer developers, manage to release for more than 4 architecture?
> > >*BSD come to mind...
> >
> > By having a much smaller set of software, mainly. The core BSDs are
> > *tiny* compared to what we try to ship in Debian.
>
> that would not explain the kernel problems that were mentioned on this
> list.
The NetBSD team, at least, has precisely one kernel. Linux has not had
"one kernel" for some time, as I understand it, but rather, a base set of
kernel sources and some large number of ports have their own port-specific
additions that may or may not mesh well with any given revision.
In addition, the kernel, core libraries, and core utilities - that is,
everything that is not "third party software" of some sort, and actually
lives in "src" instead of "pkgsrc" (Package Sources), is released in
lockstep. The Debian equivalent would be, oh, roughly "Kernel, Libc,
Essential" (and *maybe* "Required") being released as a "New Debian
Release", with all of the rest building and working correctly to a greater
or lesser degree depending on how active the maintainer of that package
source is about it, modulo some basic QA to purge the truly utterly broken
stuff.
You'll note that we've been in base-freeze with a more-or-less stable,
solid Sarge core for, uhm, how long now? All the rest, at least from a
package perspective, is gravy to the BSD folks. If you want to know (apart
from infrastructure) why it takes so long, try doing a package count.
Getting 10,000 *anything* to move together is a challenge, whether it's
packages or lemmings. Once you do, the results can be quite impressive,
granted, but it takes some doing.
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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