On Thu, Oct 06, 2005, Robert Wallner wrote about "Re: Help needed for the KODIX project": > Big projects have the tendency to forget where they came from. Not to begin > a flame war, but we are a GNU distribution, not a Linux distribution. So, > linux is just a package, the same for kfreebsd. Also, the majority of users
I'm not trying to continue a flame war, but rather trying to understand this statement. How can the type of kernel (rather than, say, the version of a specific kernel) be a "package", with Linux and freebsd being alternative packages? The reason I ask this, is because executables normally assume a lot of knowledge on the host systems, gathered during compilation from include files and libraries. Some of the latter problem (e.g., of system calls) can be solved by enforcing the use of shared libraries (and forbidding statically linked binaries), but I am guessing that many packages will not survive being taken as binaries when compiled for Linux and moved to FreeBSD without being modified. Are you trying to improve upstream packages to rely less on compile-time information, and more on run-time information? E.g., to determine on runtime whether certain system calls, certain signal numbers, and so on, are available, rather than using a "configure" script? If so, this sounds an interesting idea. Also, many many packages on a typical "Linux" distribution are strictly Linux specific: consider programs like "ps" (which works with the /proc filesystem specific to the Linux kernel), "mk2efs", "reboot", and probably dozens of others. Do all of these have Linux and BSD kernel variants, or do you produce versions that work (as binaries) on both kernels? > I update the packages I need for my work. Others update packages that they > need for theirs. It's hard to manage updating non-critical packages, so > that's why we have only half working gnome and xfce, no openoffice yet, > etc... But the stuff we work with it's good and stable enough (for us) to be > used in production environments. A decade ago, I was using what you might call a GNU/SunOS operating system: I kept the SunOS kernel, but mostly everything else was either GNU or other free software (X11 from MIT, etc.), that I downloaded and compiled myself. But keeping up with all the packages I needed was a chore. Not once did I need to perform compilations that took hours to complete (X11 and gcc were the worst), or move sources on tape because my Internet connection limitations (X11 was about 60 MB, an unbelivable whopper at that time). But today, I don't need to do that any more, because my Linux distribution (which is Fedora, but that is incidental) has almost every package that I ever needed, ready, and constantly updated and upgraded. This is the primary reason I use a Linux distribution, and not some sort of home-brewed Gnu+Linux combination. It's simply easier this way. So, if your distribution doesn't have that advantage, and for many of the packages that I use I'd need to compile them myself, well, I guess your distribution is not for me. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Oct 6 2005, 4 Tishri 5766 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The message above is just this http://nadav.harel.org.il |signature's way of propagating itself. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
