Slashdot Mirror
NetBSD Packages Collection Up To 3525 Packages
Dan writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks says that by his calculations, at the end of February 2003, there were 3525 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 3461 the previous month, a rise of 64. The Package of the Month award goes to pkgdepgraph (yet again), nominated by Andrew Brown (yet again)."
floyd@deblin:~$ apt-cache dumpavail | grep 'Package:' | wc
12312 24628 262265
Debian unstable has over 12000 available.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
is that many really necessary? I mean REALLY?
While I don't mind the occasional, hey look at this new cool software package, this seems completely out of place on Slashdot. Monthly postings of the number of packages just seems incredibly bizarre. It's not like you are posting a new revision, a new feature, a new major release, major changes. In short, this isn't news worthy, probably not even to people who use NetBSD on a daily basis. If there we're some compelling packages it would be better. It's not like they just finished porting KDE or Gnome, or MS Office to it. That would qualify as slashdot worthy.
I thought the first time it was done last month, it was weird but okay for slashdot, however, I can't see the use in posting it every month. What is there to discuss? It is merely a statistic, there isn't anything compelling in the story to discuss, hence my meta-discussion of if it is worthy of discussion.
Kirby
64 packages in one month is more than 2 packages being added a day. And besides, among the notable additions were "xmms-funtimedancer." How did NetBSD users survive without a funtime dancer?
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
didn't we just have a NetBSD package article? Is this news? We don't know how many FreeBSD and OpenBSD packages there are, how many Fink packages or Gentoo packages there are? I don't want to like like a troll but it doesn't seem nessisary
But it wasn't.
It was posted to the BSD section, where it's perfectly appropriate. I haven't noticed monthly /. BSD-section postings of the number of packages in NetBSD, and in any case I was moderately interested by this post.
So either you took time out to visit the BSD section, or you've set the /. option to collapse sections -- either way, if you're not interested, just ignore it.
The All NetBSD Packages document (long) states 3706 packages ... numbers, numbers, everywhere!
One example story was here: Stats for Feb
Posted by timothy, submitted by Dan, with a link to bsdforums.
Here is another story: Stats for January
Look at that posted by timothy, submitted by Dan with a link to bsdforums.
Like I said, I didn't mind the first or second time it was posted, but it seems silly to post them on a monthly basis. I suppose I can start submitting the number of LOC a base Linux kernel has.
There are lots of interesting stories about BSD, this isn't one of them.
I'd rather see them post interesting things about BSD, I'm sure they are out there, this isn't one of them. Statistical updates about NetBSD that consist of a single number seem dull to me. If they had a list of interesting packages, rather then a list of 64 packages of which there are 3 or 4 sets of 6 inter-related packages, so the number isn't particularly meaningful anyways...
Kirby
If it exists for Linux, it's probable that it's packaged in RPM format.
Of course, for both deb and rpm, there's the excellent checkinstall
May we never see th
And besides, among the notable additions were "xmms-funtimedancer." How did NetBSD users survive without a funtime dancer?
:-)
They haven't been. NetBSD has been dying for lack of a funtime dancer.
May we never see th
When NetBSD finally gets ported to the handheld abacus that Sir Issac Newton used (I made that up).
Forget Slashdot; the Associated Press would pick that one up in a heartbeat.
You're right, though. Even a story detailing the last package packaged each month for NetBSD would be more useful. Someone might discover a new software package.
May we never see th
I completely agree. I'm a BSD nerd myself, the BSd topic is always on my front page, but even i think this is a bit ridiculous. Sure, post when you get a cool, round milestone number like 3000 or 3500, but updating it every month is a waste of time.
All you guys seem to fail to catch one important fact: NetBSD pkgsrc does not support only NetBSD itself, but also many other operating systems, including FreeBSD, Darwin, Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc. This is another place where portability and clean design of NetBSD shines.