On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 04:49:16PM -0700, Brent Fulgham wrote: # So what exactly *is* present in Debian that would be at all # helpful?
The talent and expertise of a group of people who have been there and done that on the road that BSD is currently on. Namely with the seemless upgrades from old to new versions of packages. # I'm not trying to incite a flame war either -- I just don't see # how we can help... There just doesn't seem to be any common # ground that I've seen yet. And I'm not against the GPL, just that some in the BSD community will argue vehemently against using GNU alternatives when a BSD one exists. For better or for worse. Let's not go there because this is a thread we've all seen way too many times and it always turns out to be real ugly in the end. The common ground is two-fold really. Some people in the Debian community want to run Debian userland on top of a BSD kernel. There are probably people in the BSD community that would like to help with this. I'm just not one of them for a couple of reasons. The biggest one because I'm really not a kernel dude. Most of my work has been on/with the ports collection. The other is together we can work on combining the strengths of the two packaging systems to make one that works even better that both of the communities can use. Nobody is asking that Debian ditch dpkg and friends just as the BSD community doesn't want to lose all of what it currently has. The ports tree will probably not change because of this because it is really there for building packages and managing them is an afterthought that has proven very difficult to extend. What I'd like to see in lieu of all the talks of a complete rewrite of pkg_* from scratch is that if somehow we can work together to use (and improve) what is already in dpkg and friends that would work out of the box with both systems life would be grand. -steve
