DragonFly BSD Announced 460
JoshRendlesham writes "Matt Dillon announced today on the freebsd-hackers mailing list the creation of the DragonFly BSD project. It seeks to build on the work of FreeBSD 4.x, including a rewrite of the packaging and distribution system, among other goals."
Why dork with the existing FreeBSD... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another one? (Score:3, Insightful)
POW!
All the various BSDs share code when one solution seems to fit more than just the distribution that developed it. If DragonFly is going to focus on something that the other four aren't, then more power to them. I'm sure the others will adopt any good ideas that come out.
Re:Wonderful (Score:4, Insightful)
PORTAGE! (Score:5, Insightful)
pkg could be a lot better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, if you don't have strings installed, just google for it [google.com].
Iduno what else they've used, but they're legally entitled to use any portion they like, and many people surmise that they may have used quite a bit. Given that the copyright notice is no longer required, the world may never know.
Paging Lorraine (Score:5, Insightful)
Matt Dillon's early background as an Amiga programmer is really showing through here. He's basically proposing doing a piecewise conversion of BSD to an Amiga-style message-passing operating system.
He's basically doing the reverse of what so many folks (NeXT, HURD) have done or tried to do.. not taking a microkernal and putting a UNIX layer over it, but taking a UNIX and scooping out the inside to replace it with a message-passing microkernal.
This will definitely be a fun one to watch. Go, Matt, go.
Oh no, not another! (Score:5, Insightful)
So there.
Re:BSD and Smart People (Score:2, Insightful)
People only live so long- sure, if you could somehow force all the gurus into a "Manhattan Project," they'd probably spit something interesting out the other end, but there'd be more tradeoffs involved. You can't have a system as (philosophically) tight as OpenBSD when people are merging huge changes, as in FreeBSD, and tacking/forking things around in the kernel(s) themselves to support every piece of hardware possible, as with NetBSD.
Look at it this way, if you locked Gates and Torvalds in a room for 10 years, would the result be as good as either current product is?
So anyhow, we've got a "RedHat" - FreeBSD; we've got a "Debian" of sorts - NetBSD; and we've got OpenBSD, which has no obvious peer anywhere else. (Sure, Theo's gang shoots the food now and then - I got a bit tired around the OpenSSH holes, as did everyone - but as a research beast that craps running, user-ready software, they're doing great.) Now we've got DragonFly, which could really be the 'BSD for the desktop.'
Darwin doesn't really count -- it runs, a lot of hackers enjoy it because they enjoy helping Apple, but without the Cocoa and Quartz APIs, you're left with little but a crippled research OS. OS X itself is only Free if you're purchasing Apple hardware.
Security? (Score:2, Insightful)
- Not Theo, but not Bill either
Re:pkg could be a lot better (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't trying to show that FreeBSD ports was somehow *easier* than Portage (or anything else for that matter), simply that it was not very difficult at all, and it gets the job done nicely.
Personally, I don't see the problem with doing a little configuration to make the system behave exactly as I want. To me, that's a feature, not a flaw. Not to mention the fact that the 20 or so lines of command and code you seem to have a problem with, is a one-time setup task. After that, the system is a two-command process, one command if I create a simple shell script, no command if I add a cron job to do it once a week. This is just like your two-command process, except for the fact that *I* have dictated the mechanics of the process, rather than allowing a distributor to decide those mechanics for me.
Ports in freebsd are cool. But updating packages installed, and updating the whole system, are two very cool things i would like to see.
All you have to do is look, it's all right there. CVSup will update your ports tree, your source tree, your docs, or a custom combination of all of the above. Portupgrade will update all of your ports with one command. As to updating the system, the system and the ports are kept separate *by design*. The system can be upgraded independently from the ports, and vice versa. Updating the system itself is as simple as a 'make buildworld', 'make kernel', 'make installworld', and reboot.
I dunno. Maybe this is just an "old school vs. new school" issue. "Old school" UNIX users and sysadmins simply see this as a reasonable means to get things done. "New school" Linux users (a lot of whom are migrating from the Windows world) seem to be looking for the command-line equivalent of clicking a button to get everything done. No work, and no knowledge of the system itself and how it operates, required.
I, for one, prefer the old school way.
Re:pkg could be a lot better (Score:3, Insightful)
If ease and elegance of updating the operating system were the main criteria for picking one, we'd all be running Windows. Can't get much easier than going to a website and doing it all with one mouse button and rebooting.
Re:Wonderful (Score:1, Insightful)
So BSD is not really free, is it? There are strings attached.
Glad I found out before wasting my time downloading it.
Re:Another one? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd install stuff by hand. I just want to update my ports - I don't think that's too much to ask.
Yes, I've submitted that as a bug. Yes, it was rejected.