FreeBSD 4.6 Release Delayed

Dan writes "Bruce A. Mah from the FreeBSD Release Engineering team announced that due to some late-breaking issues, 4.6 will be released about a week later than originally planned."

Comments

Re:Apple

[JordanH]

• • Apple?

  Not exactly fair to claim this as embracing a free BSD base, as OSX is not free, portable, and open-source.

No, but Darwin, on which OSX is based, is free, portable and open-source. Oh, and it's based on a free BSD base (with a Mach microkernel).

• This is like claiming MS-DOS is based on Unix because it has files and directories.

More like claiming that Solaris is based on AT&T Unix, which it is.

Re:Apple

[JordanH]

• If the Darwin kernel is actually based off the 4.4BSD code then fair enough. But I haven't seen that it is.

You might not see this if you don't actually look into it. Like, maybe start at that link I provided?

From this discussion of the history of Darwin we read:

Darwin also incorporates a full implementation of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX, welded on top of the Mach kernel.

and

Darwin wraps a customized version of 4.4 BSD-Lite2 kernel and userspace around Mach. It includes many of the POSIX APIs, exporting them to user-space, and abstracts Darwin's file system and networking. Darwin's BSD also provides the process model, basic security policies, and threading support for Mac OS X.

I guess seeing that much of Darwin is based on the 4.4BSD(-lite2) code, then this is "fair enough" for you.

From what I can tell, Mach is a very bare bones kernel here, not providing a process model or networking, etc.

Re:FreeBSD is more straightforward than Linux IMHO

[slamb]

I honestly don't see how the installation program is difficult to use. I have heard many people complain about it, but it's not hard to use at all. Of course I haven't used any recent Linux installers (last Linux I used was Slackware 7) with all the dumbed-down GUI luvin', but I still fail to see how a straightforward ANSI menu system is confusing and difficult?!

Well, don't take our word for it. Read here why Jordan Hubbard thinks it sucks - and he wrote it. (Section 2.2 describes sysinstall.) A select quote:

dialog(3) is also extremely limited in the user-friendliness department and lacks features like the ability to put more than 2 buttons into a dialog or a Yes/No dialog which had a selectable default (e.g. No). The inability to put a "Back" button into various dialogs which could really use one or the necessity for asking only "positive" questions are outgrowths of those limitations and good examples of how an insufficiently powerful UI library can drive the utility-writer in undesirable but unavoidable directions.

It also describes various reasons the ports system sucks, though "hard to use" isn't on my list. My major complaint with it is that the "base system" isn't packaged. With a RedHat system it is, and you can really take advantage of this. For example, when doing a security audit, boot from external media, check the GPG signatures in the package database, do a "rpm -Va", and make sure nothing extra is in suspicous places. ("rpm -qal" to get a list of what should be there, a "find" command to get what actually is.) You then know no binaries have been tampered with. With a BSD system, you pretty need to reinstall.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike these systems. It's all about weighing the choices - some new FreeBSD 5.0 features (KSEs in particular) sound interesting enough that I might switch a system or two back to BSD when it's released.