DragonFly BSD Announced

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Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @09:33AM from the skimming-and-darting dept.

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."

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Re:Another one? by Kiriwas · 2003-07-16 09:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

That doesn't make sense to me. Thats like deciding there are too many car manufacturers and complaining to Ford that there should be fewer and better car manufacturers. In fact, it would be EASIER to do this in the car industry because you can probably get the major car manufacturers together. No one ever said this new BSD was going to be good, just that it was here. No one said you should support it, but then again maybe you should. Each distro of anything is subject to the people that make it. If you want one final all encompassing sent-from-God BSD then go and make it!
New Packaging System by kevin_conaway · 2003-07-16 09:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

Are they talking about replacing the ports system? I thought that that was one of those most revered parts of the original FreeBSD
PORTAGE! by MarcQuadra · 2003-07-16 09:55 · Score: 1, Interesting

I'm crossing my fingers that this comes out with Portage as the package manager...

--
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
BSD and Smart People by mslinux · 2003-07-16 10:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

The problem with BSD is that there are too many Albert Einstein-like people involved with its development... and Matt Dillion is one of them. I don't mean that in a bad way. These guy are *smart* probably one in a billion kind of smart. The problem with that is they can't work together very well. Theo (Open BSD), Matt (FreeBSD) Both these guys forked over differences of opinion with other developers.

Imagine what these guys could actually *do* if they put aside their differences and worked together!! No unsolved CS problem would be safe.
Matt Dillon, eh? by Spudley · 2003-07-16 10:23 · Score: 2, Interesting

Wow. Matt Dillon. :) There's a name that brings back memories.

Matt: if you're reading this, I loved DICE, and all your other work on the Amiga - your compiler is one of the reasons I'm a programmer today. I hadn't been keeping up with your work but it's good to see you're still out there doing stuff. :)
(seems a lot of the old Amiga 'big names' have gone on to do interesting stuff in the time since)

--
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
1. Re:Matt Dillon, eh? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-16 10:32 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Dillon is the ONLY reason I'm paying any attention to this. Dillon kicks ass. He can make it work, if anyone can.
  
  And yeah, I also owned a copy of DICE on my Amiga. Awesome compiler. Still have the floppies.
  
  (Of course, then ixlib came along with GCC...)
2. Re:Matt Dillon, eh? by m.dillon · 2003-07-16 10:59 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  You are welcome, and ditto to the other followup poster! Now for the scary part: Despite the demise of the Amiga there are still people who use DICE, and DASM (65xx/687xx assembler). Apparently DASM has become a favorite in the classic Atari world. There are also still many old hardware installations based on the 68K and DICE is one of the few (complete) compiler toolsets for the 68K that can be run on a modern platform. Yow!
  -Matt
Re:Messaging layer by Chexum · 2003-07-16 10:51 · Score: 5, Interesting

The proposed new messaging layer sounds really interesting and powerful. A little like Mach or QNX, perhaps?
No (or perhaps yes), from the superficial look, it seems very similar to the AmigaOS exec.library's functions. No surprise here, given Matt's background as an arch-developer for Amiga :) See also DICE: Dillon's C Compiler... It's very weird to see the Amiga resurrected inside BSD..

--
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
Re:Oh no, not another! by afternoon · 2003-07-16 11:11 · Score: 2, Interesting

It's a double edged sword, you divide the codebase and you might divide the market. However, I think that the hundreds of versions of Linux have been really good in that they've created a fairly cutthroat Darwinian environment. We as users and admins can only benefit from the innovations coming from that. I really believe that evolution is the method most likely to create a platform to supercede all others.

But then maybe I liked Blondie 24 too much.
Well, good luck to him! by DarkHelmet433 · 2003-07-16 11:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

Having NetBSD/FreeBSD seperate was good in many ways because it kept mutually incompatable folks away from each others throats. Once things cooled down, technology began to flow in both directions between NetBSD and FreeBSD. Later on, OpenBSD came along. All sorts of good things came from that. Can you say OpenSSH?

It would be nice if DragonFlyBSD (gah, ENAMETOOLONG) was a similar deal. As a FreeBSD developer, I hope that there will be plenty of opportunities to take good stuff in both directions. If we can keep people away from each others throats and work on making the code better, then everybody wins.

Diversity is good. Developers fighting each other is bad. Forks can be a good way to relieve the stress. There is no need to make a Big Deal(TM) about it.
Re:Messaging layer by Billly+Gates · 2003-07-16 11:39 · Score: 4, Interesting

Matt Dilion was fired from the FreeBSD team.

Technically its not a job but they refuse all his patches and he lost write access. The chances now of it being merged into FreeBSD are remote.

He had no choice but to fork if he wanted to continue developing. That or join the Openbsd team or Linux.

Infact Dillion help fixed the vm bug in Linux 2.4. He actually has already developed Linux code.

--
http://saveie6.com/
Re:Wonderful by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-16 12:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

You know I was trolling. Why is it I get modded up when I troll and modded as a troll when I write about something I feel strongly about?
Anyway, XMach is a version of BSD with a Mach-based kernel. I don't know what's the status of that current project, with Darwin and HURD nipping at its heels (not that either are perfect replacements) its not as popular as it might otherwise be.
Remember, BSD is also defined by the userland. I look forward to BSD/Linux, the one true user land with the best supported kernel. Not going to happen but I can dream.
As far as the Windows comment, that others have commented upon, yeah it was an off-the-cuff why-not-put-that-in thing with the infamous TCP/IP stack thing at the back of my mind. Mind you, apparently most layers of that stack have been rewritten, leaving a handful of userland utilities such as FTP that still have BSD code in them.
Re:pkg could be a lot better by Wastl · 2003-07-16 19:07 · Score: 2, Interesting

And if you add something like the following in /etc/make.conf, you also get "make update" in /usr/src. :-)

SUP_UPDATE= yes SUP= /usr/local/bin/cvsup SUPFLAGS= -g -L 2 SUPHOST= cvsup3.de.FreeBSD.org SUPFILE= /etc/cvsup/standard-supfile PORTSSUPFILE= /etc/cvsup/ports-supfile DOCSUPFILE= /etc/cvsup/doc-supfile
Sebastian
Re:Good luck to you Matt. by m.dillon · 2003-07-16 23:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

You know, I hear this junk all the time and I can only conclude that the people who spout it off have no real understanding of what the BSD or GPL licenses actually are, let alone their respective effects on the environment around them. The hype has far outstripped the reality and the result are hoards of young programmers slapping the GPL on trivia and minutia that has no other effect then that of relegating their bits to the dustbin of history. And the really sad thing is that it can take years sometimes to realize you've screwed yourself when, say, ten years down the line you want to use work you did on a collaborative project for something that doesn't quite fit the license and find you can't because you have no idea who else to contact to unwind the GPL'd mess. Oops! I find the GPL useful only if I intend to potentially relicense to commercial entities under separate cover and that is pretty much it. The BSD does a better job, statistically, in polluting commercial source bases with open standards and always will. Even microsoft's attempts to proprietize BSD licensed code has resulted in a far greater adoption of open standards, such as with kerberos, then if they had written their own from scratch which would have been 100% proprietary instead of only 5% proprietary. TCP and DNS also come to mind. Those were big wins for our side folks, mostly looked over because you idiots focused in on what microsoft tried to do rather then the actual big picture effect of what they wound up doing.
The problem with the GPL is that it doesn't trust its fate to human nature but instead tries to force an effect that tends to be against human nature. GPL is a license based on fear and uncertainty, at least from an idealogical standpoing. The BSD license recognizes human nature and works with it to far greater effect for the society as a whole. I prefer trust to fear. I'm just not the paranoid type and if one doesn't have commercial motives for using the GPL one really has to have a high level of paranoia to justify it. That is the reality of the GPL. I use it occassionally, but for commercial reasons only. Everything else I do under the BSD.
-Matt