http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/13/ns-14670.html: "Darwin 1.0 is a bootable version of the OS X kernel and Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) layer. No Quartz, no Carbon, no Cocoa, no Aqua. Darwin has no windowing system of its own and is therefore limited to just a single, text-based console."
No vc's...? "Darwin ships with a full suite of tools necessary to start development. A gcc 2.7/egcs hybrid compiler is part of the distribution, as are Perl -- 5.6.0 no less! -- and Pico (we all have our biases). Also of note is that Darwin's standard packaging scheme is Debian's, which -- not unlike the BSDs in general -- seems to be well-liked and underpublicized." "well-liked?"; shouldn't it be "technologically more advanced?" It seems that Apple has seen the light. What extension would Apple's packages be? .apl? Long ago, on multi-platform NextStep, NeXT devised "fat" format for the software packages. Since Debian is also available on multiple platforms, I think it would be useful to add this feature to .deb's (and APT, of course). One of the purposes of the fat format was to save some space; ie: the "resources files" for the available platforms were basically the same. Now, Linux has X applications, which have resources (eg: .png's, .tiff's, or maybe some GUI definition files). I believe that duplications are not needed, and .deb's which understand fat format would be useful. On .deb's that are get downloaded, the feature can be implemented; ftp can start transferring from any byte-offsets after all (just like what apt-get currently does). BTW, having an APT that understand multiple sources (may be defined in Packages.gz) could be nice too. Think about the (future) proliferation of JavaBeans; a browser, or an IDE dev. tool might need the .jar files that are located here and there. With "multiple sources", www.debian.org doesn't have to store all the available Debian packages existing on Earth. It would give freedom to the software developers too; there could be several JavaBeans classes that have the same functions (behaviors?). A developer could choose that a particular JavaBeans from a particular site is more suitable for his/her Beans products; and the links are included in the .deb file. Oki