Date: 10 Mar 2000 23:53:41 +0100 From: naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSD Merger Announcement Message-ID: <8abudl$ngt$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> References: <20000309235232L.jhix@mindspring.com> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003100422060.690-100000@sasami.jurai.net>
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Matthew N. Dodd <winter@jurai.net> wrote:
> Another area of mutual benefit is the ports system and while each OS uses
> different tools and implementations in their build/install/package system
> the patches and other meta-information is likely to be sharable. Wouldn't
> it be nice if we had a unified ports tree?
Yes, but I don't see any sign of (interest in) this.
The {Free,Net,Open}BSD ports systems have diverged significantly.
NetBSD seems to have greatly improved the pkg tools. On the OpenBSD
front, Marc Espie is continously reworking the ports system (and
cleaning up make(1) along with it), but while he probably would
appreciate if his work was shared by the other BSDs, nobody there
seems to take notice.
Log messages like
"Stop phantasizing about merging pkgs back into FreeBSD, instead
tell people to submit patches that apply without fuzz. (Maybe
someone could explain the exact issues with this)."
(seen this evening on NetBSD's source-changes mailing list, i.e.
their equivalent of cvs-all) don't inspire my confidence that there
is any interest in merging the ports trees. Hell, we can't even
agree on a common name for the p* system!
> If we had users/developers from all 3 projects working on
> maintaining the ports/pkgsrc/foo tree we'd probably be in a better
> position to keep it up to date. Maybe its time to split the ports
> tree off into its own project? I know the last time such a thing
> was discussed the other projects rejected the idea fearing that
> they would lack representation in something that was essentially
> FreeBSD centric. What are the solutions to this problem?
The same as for the userland reunification that was proposed
elsewhere in this thread.
Change needs to flow from the bottom up. You need a grassroots
movement. Developers from all projects need to look at the other
projects' work and start merging in changes. Don't politicize, just
do it. The NIH attitude needs to go from people's minds. Gratuitous
differences must not be introduced. If you add a new port/feature,
try to add it to all projects in parallel. Find similar thinking
developers at the other projects.
There was a "BSD boosters" project "to bring the userlands of the
three BSD's (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD) closer together in order
to provide for a consistent set of base tools and manual pages."
I think it can be safely considered defunct at this time. See
http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai/bsdb.html
for an idea that failed.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de
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