On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 02:16:04AM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Debian developers are mostly GNU/Linux users and are likely to use > GNU specific features, and not ready to stop this usage for a port > that have yet to happen.
The vast majority of code shipped by Debian is not Debian-specific and should not be Linux specific. In those cases, failing to build on NetBSD can be reasonably considered a bug (in most cases, there's no good reason to use glibc or Linux specific code) or suggest a useful feature that's missing in the NetBSD libc. I've met little resistance from people regarding the first of these, and the NetBSD folks have been extremely happy to add things that fall into the latter. > So your best bet to get your port released is to provide an environment > as similar as the GNU/Linux so that most packages will build out of > the box. Using glibc and GNU tools is a big step in this direction. I think using GNU tools is certainly likely to happen - I think it would be hard to reasonably argue that it's a Debian system unless ls --color works... Glibc is, I think, less important. From the packages I've tried, very few failures have been due to glibc/libc issues - frankly, I've had more trouble with packages that notice that they're building on NetBSD and so want to produce manpages in cat format, which is something that's true of any port. > Coming with a distribution with less feature/efficiency than the original > *BSD flavour is not a problem as long as said feature are not part of > the release criteria. Uh, of course it is. Producing software that sucks but happens to satisfy release criteria does little to benefit Debian, our users or the free software community. Doing it right is more important, even if that means it takes longer. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
