Quoting Will Yardley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > it seems to me that these are two different things since bsd isn't a > hardware type; it's a kernel and operating system.
It amounts to the same thing, really. The purpose of an operating system (according to Dr. Tanenbaum) is to provide an abstract virtual machine for applications to run on without having to deal with the complexities of the actual hardware. Porting to a new kernel means porting to a new virtual machine. Not much different from porting to a different architecture from the point of view of the non-kernel developer. For the kernel developer it's a different ball of wax entirely, but we're not developing kernels, we're using the existing NetBSD ones. > so it seems to me that 'debian-bsd' should be something different > from 'debian-sparc' or 'debian-alpha' since it's not using a linux > kernel. I think that would defeat the whole point. Debian is not Linux. We have an impressive collection of packages available for the Debian system already, almost all of which compile into binary packages easily whether you use debian-i386, debian-alpha, debian-sparc, etc. Tapping into this would be a great boon to debian-bsd, and the fact that it's a different kernel is not an argument for why we shouldn't do this (unless you don't believe that "Debian is not Linux"). For that matter, debian-sparc does run under a different kernel than debain-i386, so your argument is spurious. Ideally, debian-bsd should be just another branch that gets released with each Debian version. Obviously we could never make it into woody at this point, but maybe the next release? > i am not a huge expert on operating systems, but it seems that using > gnu utilities and ext2 and making it more gnu/linux-like is taking > away a lot of what makes *bsd so great; Well, I don't think anyone really wants to see ext2 for BSD, Debian or otherwise. As for GNU utilities, I don't see how making them available takes anything away from what makes *BSD so great. In fact, in my case, since the portability of NetBSD is what makes it great for me, having the GNU utilities available in addition to the BSD ones would greatly enhance what makes NetBSD so great, as well as making porting a lot of other packages much easier. I really don't want to dig through every bloody script in every bloody Debian package and translate them when I can just point them at the version of (insert program here) that understands the flags as it expects. > not that these are bad, but if people wanted them they'd use gnu/linux :> Spoken like a true i386-centric person. Sorry, but that's simply not an option for many of us. Which is my primary reason for being interested in Debian/BSD. > looking through the archives it seems that this is the never-ending > debate... About time we resolve it, then. Personally, I think it should be a no-brainer. This is "debian-bsd", not "a new BSD that resembles the Debian project in its philosophy and some of the tools it uses". If I'm wrong, let me know quick and I won't waste any more of people's time with my rambling on how to get debian-as-it-currently-exists up and running under the BSD kernels... -- GT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.dreamsmith.org "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one else can take for us or spare us." - Marcel Proust
