DragonFly BSD Announced

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."

Comments

Why dork with the existing FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

...packages and ports system. They're part of the best things FreeBSD has above Linux right now!

Re:Another one?

[EelBait]

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

[gantrep]

BSD Code in Windows

PORTAGE!

[MarcQuadra]

I'd like to see Gentoo's Portage move onto BSD, it was originally inspired by the BSD ports system, but has become very easy to use and refined. It's time for a BSD to try out Portage (Mac OS X is geting Portage soon!)

pkg could be a lot better

[HiFire]

I find this project exciting. Having tried gentoo's portage it has become clear to me that ports could be a lot better. While ports does work, it has a bunch of tools which make its use easier which arent included by default and could be integrated into ports.

Re:pkg could be a lot better

[iiioxx]

WORST example EVER. 2 lines in gentoo(cd to the ports dir, and make update) compred to 20 freaking lines you posted where you have to edit a file, make a directory and other crap that i don't want, or should have, to do.

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

[Cyclometh]

Well said. The problem with "easy" and "elegant" is that it's a pretty short step to "unconfigurable" and "uncustomizable". FreeBSD's design assumes that *you* want to control how things happen, not some preconfigured process designed by somebody who had no idea what your needs were.

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

[Elwood P Dowd]

Try "strings ftp.exe"

Or, if you don't have strings installed, just google for it.

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

[jonabbey]

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!

[foolip]

My first reaction was "oh, forking is bad, we don't need another". But in truth, this is no more remarkable than the fact that there are 100s if not 1000s of different flavors of GNU/Linux.

So there.

Re:BSD and Smart People

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, reading his proposal, this thing could be great- it's some of the best aspects of his BSD work, and things like AmigaOS, Be, HURD, and even Linux, rolled into one "modern," innately UNIX-compatible whole.

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?

[SewersOfRivendell]

It strikes me that, for any operating system capable of interacting with a network, security should be addressed as a top-level goal. I don't see it even mentioned on the web site.

- Not Theo, but not Bill either

Re:Wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

they are still forbidden from hiding that fact.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I gotta chime in here. It really pisses me off that FreeBSD does not let you (by default)

% cd /usr/ports
% make update

It tells you that you need to futz around and configure things. If I wanted to do that,
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.