Re: RFC: Better portability for package maintainers
On Sunday 21 May 2006 17:34, Erast Benson wrote:
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> > > But I hope you still got me right. For me, all these "things" are
> > > existing applications which must run. The world is not 100% open
> > > sourced yet and we are in it, we are part of it, therefore my ideal OS
> > > need to be capable to run existing freeware and closed binaries as is
> > > without re-compilation. I want to run VMware, Oracle, Skype, SAP,
> > > Macromedia flush, etc, etc, etc. I want my Nexenta to run DTrace,
> > > BrandZ
> > > virtualization, ZFS, Zones without major re-design, etc, etc, etc...
> > >
> > > Once you accompany OpenSolaris kernel with GLIBC, you will kill this
> > > capability, you will not be able to run anything other than OSS
> > > compiled for your particular distro. That was my point. And isn't LSB
> > > is what GNU/Linux moving towards to? In OpenSolaris we have its Core
> > > which we following as a standard and I don't see any single reason not
> > > to do so.
> >
> > You have your points right, but you should realize that Debian GNU /
> > <Kernel>, is glibc based. This means that your Base System without the
> > kernel should come from GNU sources. Having that said, you should invest
> > some efforts to port glibc to the Solaris (or OpenSolaris, Nevada,
> > whatever[1]) kernel (to support all these fancy features mentioned
> > above), as this has been done for glibc and the FreeBSD kernel by Bruno
> > Haible.
>
> I'm personally will not do that. As I said earlier, I did it a year ago,
> I even managed to run statically linked binaries on GLIBC + OpenSolaris
> kernel. Than I realized that the resulted Operating Environment will not
> be compatible with *anything* existing... how much it will be better
> than GNU/Linux or GNU/OpenSolaris or SUN/OpenSolaris? I realized that
This is how (around glibc) the Debian's Linux and non-Linux ports are being
constructed. And yes, they are innovative. Glibc is not tighten to any
existing kernel or arch. I know that it all depends on what Base System you
are targeting and want to be a part of. Seems you prefer being a distribution
of OpenSolaris (kernel+libc) to allow existing Solaris proprietary binaries
to run unmodified and use the packaging system tools from the Debian Project.
Still I can not find anything innovatiove here, except that the broken
Solaris pkg system is replaced by a more comprehensive and robust one. Being
also a (not very impressed) Solaris (7/8/9) user this seems as an progress
and I appreciate that, but it is not enough for users like me ;-)
> porting effort might be greatly minimized by utilizing different
> approaches:
>
> 1) provide 100% Debian environment, so native Debian scripts will run as
> is;
> 2) extend SUN C library with missing GLIBC functionality;
> 3) use of side libraries like libiconv, gettext, libintl;
> 4) use of transitional packages.
Good. You are working for extending OpenSolaris kernel+libc, but why do you
believe it is technically possible and feasible to become an official Debian
port with such a system ? Being an independent OpenSolaris distribution using
packaging system from Debian should be enough for your effort I believe.
> As the result, we are fast approaching to the point when all existing
> Debian APT repo will be fully ported to Nexenta. We have 7000+ packages
> at the moment and will probably have 10000+ by the end of next month.
I believe that in this case the Easiest is not the Right [tm] ;-)
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