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Porting Debian to... Windows

Posted by michael on from the not-making-this-up dept.

mike_sucks writes: "The first step to porting Debian to the Win32 platform has been made - dpkg is compiling under Cygwin. Check out the post on debian-devel and the Debian GNU/w32 port's site." Some of the posters on the debian-devel list aren't too pleased with the idea.

2 of 416 comments (clear)

  1. One Word by Quasar1999 · · Score: 4, Informative

    VmWare...

    Why go through the hassle of porting it, when you can just run it on any OS you like using VmWare...???

    --

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    Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
  2. The "controversy" by Daniel · · Score: 5, Informative

    A lot of people seem to think that the posters on debian-devel are trying to somehow suppress or forbid this port of software. Although some of us may be uneasy about it, I haven't seen anyone actually suggest that.

    The question causing argument is whether this port should be officially recognized by the Debian Project, given that one of our foundational documents says "Debian will remain 100% free software", and that software which depends on non-free software to run is considered "not part of Debian".

    The crux of the matter is this, from a post on the list by Stephen Langseck:

    I recognize the advantages of a dpkg-based system for cygwin, and think
    it's an interesting idea that will benefit many people who can't
    necessarily choose the OS of their computer; but even so, I have
    misgivings about using the Debian name on such a port. If the non-free
    archive is not part of Debian, should a port built on a non-free kernel
    be called 'Debian'? After all, unless all the compiling for this port
    will be done using Wine and gcc, you effectively will have an entire
    port with build-dependencies on non-free software.

    Daniel

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    Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!