On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 06:18:56PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes: > > I'd love to be proved wrong on kfreebsd's value to users and the project. > I'd personally find it frustrating and demoralizing if, after working > really hard on a project for quite some time, I asked for it to be > included and got back "mmm, sorry, no, you didn't blow me away, but I'm > not going to tell you what would blow me away so that you could remedy > it." I don't think that's what you're really trying to say, but I'm not > sure I can figure out what you *are* trying to say from this thread.
Try "please, blow me away". If kfreebsd gets added to Debian, I'm going to get asked "So, kfreebsd, huh?" and I'd love to be able to respond in a really positive way: "yes, it solves ____ a problem" or "it demonstrates this really awesome new technique, _____, that's miles beyond anything else, even linux" or /something/. For GNU/Solaris, that would be "dtrace" amongst other things for Linux people, and "well supported packaging" for Solaris people. But for kfreebsd, I'm lost as to any answer beyond "oh, some people get a kick out of it, it doesn't actually achieve anything much beyond what Debian GNU/Linux does, or what regular FreeBSD does". A Debian port of ReactOS or Minix or Plan9 or FMI/OS would likewise be interesting in their own right, afaics -- they're significantly different operating system concepts to what Debian already does, and afaik they don't already have an effective distribution. If we were seriously planning on trying to have Debian ports of all sorts of different operating systems -- Hurd, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Solaris, ReactOS, Minix _and_ FMI/OS eg, it'd be easy to say "supporting kfreebsd is part of our aim to truly be the universal distribution, supporting absolutely everything we can". That would absolutely blow me away if done seriously [0]. In that case it's not the BSDs that are what's interesting, they're as much part of the path to supporting everything than a destination in their own right. One thing I'd like to see for candidate x86/x86_64 architectures is a preinstalled vmware-format image (which aiui will work under both qemu and vmplayer) that can be used to easily demonstrate what's so fantastic about a new OS. Given something fantastic that makes it all worthwhile, all the practical things can be solved. Without any particularly interesting goals that get people excited and involved and can be clearly described, I think there'll be long term problems in keeping the port active. Cheers, aj [0] By "seriously" I mean recognising the problems -- eg the lack of success we've had with making the Hurd suitable for general use, or the devisions within the BSDs, and the GPL v CDDL concerns for Nexenta, etc -- and dealing with them; which might mean talking to upstream, or creating new technologies, or establishing convincingly that concerns within the Debian project aren't actually justified, or whatever else.
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