On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 05:39:36PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > At the same time, however, we have a very large number of very smart > systems hackers, and a huge legion of people who've already ported a > large chunk of the software you're looking at to NetBSD before and > therefore have serious experience doing it. There are a bunch of good > people who've been working on pkgsrc forever and are very enthusiastic > -- that's why we have about 2000 packages in pkgsrc even though we > have a much smaller userbase than Debian.
Oh, certainly. There's absolutely no way that I'd even think about doing this without the effort that's been put in by the NetBSD people (as I've said elsewhere, I'm using NetBSD's patches to gcc in order to get the thing to compile, let alone be usable). I really am greatly impressed at just how polished large amounts of NetBSD are, and I truly appreciate the effort that's gone into getting it to run on such a wide range of platforms. My opinions are also somewhat shaped by the fact that NetBSD is the first UNIX I ever used, way back in 1995 :) > You'd have to be pretty flexible about how the goals were stated, > however. NetBSD people are by and large going to be uninterested in > your goals -- they're interested in their own -- but there is no > reason that the two can't overlap in interesting ways. This is, of > course, only to be expected -- whenever any two people or groups work > together each has their own goals, and cooperation is based on > recognizing how to work on the overlapping parts and how not to fight > about others. >From my point of view (I should probably emphasise that I'm not yet an official Debian developer, and I in no way whatsoever speak for the Debian project or even anyone else on this list :) ) there are three reasons that I'm interested in this project: 1) It means that Debian can be run on a wider range of hardware than it currently can be 2) It means that Debian is less tied to Linux than it currently is. Debian GNU/Hurd exists but is still not really usable - a Debian distribution based on the NetBSD kernel should be just as usable as a Debian distribution based on the Linux kernel. Both are DFSG free, and a Debian NetBSD distribution would fulfil all the criteria of the Debian social contract 3) It's something that's fun to play with and just seem cool :) As I hinted above, my personal preference is for a system that is as similar to Debian Linux and Debian HURD as possible, which is obviously not going to be something that is going to attract large number of NetBSD users to Debian (my preference would be for a primarily GNU userspace, for instance, and usage of Debian-style packages rather than the ports system, thereby removing many of the reasons that I'd expect are responsible for current NetBSD users using NetBSD), and my intention certainly wouldn't be to attempt to compete with the NetBSD project in any way. On the other hand, it is likely to expose the NetBSD code to a larger (even if only slightly) userbase. I'm certainly not interested in forking NetBSD in any way, and I doubt that anyone else here is either. I'm certainly planning on forwarding anything I discover that could be useful to the NetBSD developers. The fundamental goal of the Debian project is to increase the number of people using Free software, and there's absolutely no advantage in doing anything that restricts the ability of anyone to improve the quality of their software. > I have now looked over a bunch of the older mail in the archive and > there seems to be a perception of hostility by the BSD people. Well, > in almost every open source community I've worked in, people in > general seem to have a lack of needed diplomacy skills, and that goes > for the Linux universe as well as the BSD universe. Make no mistake -- > you'd need to be a bit more flexible than you're perhaps used to and > try pretty hard not to be offended by a minority that got angry > easily. I'm well used to having large numbers of people shouting at me loudly, so this doesn't bother me to any great extent :) I don't expect everyone on the planet to be enthusiastic about the concept of a Debian distribution based around NetBSD, and I certainly imagine that there will be paranoid people on both "sides" who see the idea as some sort of personal insult designed to weaken either Debian or NetBSD. However, I also imagine that there will be people who are more concerned about the quality of the code than petty squabbling. I expect we'll see how it balances out before too long :) > However, the benefits might be very large for all concerned. It might > be worth discussing. Agreed. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
