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!

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.

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.