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BSD Version Of Gentoo's Portage
eugene ts wong writes "Here is some good news for BSD users. Gentoo Weekly Newsletter has an article that says that there is a BSD version of portage. It's still in a developmental stage, but it's definitely making progress."
Efforts like this could end up splitting the Gentoo user base. Will he go to BSD and kill Gentoo as we know it, or will he stay with Linux? :(
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
On the way out
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
*BSD's foot is in the grave.
Development of *BSD nowadays is mired by bylaws, committees, reports and milestones. Technically, the *BSD project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips the ability of the developers to deliver. There's no simple solution to this. Why would anyone choose to use a *BSD over other faster, more stable systems?
Why did *BSD fail?
We can all agree that *BSD is a failure. Yet why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between myriad incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?
Ouija boards
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Fact: *BSD is dying
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Dear GOD. That *BSD thing must have been dead for a week for it to smell this bad..
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
On the way out
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
*BSD's foot is in the grave.
Development of *BSD nowadays is mired by bylaws, committees, reports and milestones. Technically, the *BSD project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips the ability of the developers to deliver. There's no simple solution to this. Why would anyone choose to use a *BSD over other faster, more stable systems?
Why did *BSD fail?
We can all agree that *BSD is a failure. Yet why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between myriad incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?
Ouija boards
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Most BSD users don't want this. Ports works quite well for us, thank you very much. Any shortcomings that Ports has, are being worked on.
1 of the things that I like about portage is the ease of use. You don't have to find dependencies. Nor do you have to find the web sites that host these packages. If you can find a place that's closer than the defaults, then you'll have the option of getting packages from there.
I think that these general advantages should be available all across the board for all OSes, unless of course there are specific needs for specific alternatives.
I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything. I'm just sharing my own likes & dislikes.
testing out my trending skills
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle ; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenge s that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machine's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
The differences I've noted is that portage is upgraded every now and then which gives you the small trouble of running etc-update and upgrade it's config files. It might actually be broken at some times to.
Ports on the other side is rock solid and has been used for a much longer time. You can of course set compiler flags for ports to, and atleast for freebsd the upgrade tool is as good as the gentoo one. I do however like netbsds approch most since their pkgsrc seems most intelligent with their /usr/pkg path for everything installed from it. I must admit I don't know that much about their different port handling tools thought, I've mostly used make install.
The huge advantage of gentoos portage is the USE-flags, which I really like. Don't know if it would be hard to get the same functionallity in the BSDs without using portage, or if there already are a few alternatives which works almost the same way. Feel free to reply or e-mail me information about usefull ports tools if you have any.
As a FreeBSD user, my question is this: How exactly is this different from the ports tree? I thought that it was basically the same. I am glad to see somebody doing it, though.
Best Slashdot comment ever
I can't see the difference. If anything pkg_add -r would almost be suprior
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The big question on my mind is "why?" Why would I want to use portage instead of ports? Why would I want to use a copy when I already have the original?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I like the ports system n' all, but I certainly like portage a lot better. :)!
I for one am glad to see it
--- If I had a funny sig too, you might be laughing now.
The End of FreeBSD
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers
http://nero-online.org/trollse/BSD/
The *BSD Wailing Song
What's left for me to see
In my ship I sailed so far
What can the answer be
Don't know what the questions are.
And after all I've done
Still I cannot feel the sun
Tell me save me
In the end our lost souls must repent.
I must know it is for certain
Can it be the final curtain
As long as the wind will blow
I'll be searching high and low.
Who knows what's really true
They say the end is so near
Why are we all so cruel
We just fill ourselves with fear.
And heaven and hell will turn
All that we love shall burn
Hear me trust me
Inthe end our lost sould must repent.
I must know it is for certain
Can it be the final curtain
As long as the wind will blow
I'll be searching high and low
Final curtain
Final curtain
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the generous goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
I see absolutely zero need for Portage on any of the popular BSD systems, except for Mac OS X. Having it on Mac OS X would be much better than using Fink.
I use Fink now, but I don't have flexibility in deciding what features I wish to have compiled in to my software (at least, not that I am aware of).
Find free books.
1 thing that I hope that they add is the abiblity to not update the entire portage tree. Otherwise, we are forced to download way too much data that we may never use, when all we want to do is update the packages that we have already.
testing out my trending skills
Portage doesn't replace makefiles, at least not the ones provided to build the actual program.
The FreeBSD's ports' Makefile basically sets a load of build/package organization variables, almost the same as a portage "ebuild" does. An ebuild is a script though. I've submitted a few when I was trying out Gentoo a while ago.
Portage just happens to be written in python (good choice BTW IMHO) whereas the traditional pkg-tools for FreeBSD are C based and the portupgrade utility is written in Ruby.
Portage was inspired by NetBSD's pkgsrc which was derived from FreeBSD ports. Flags like PROVIDES are similar to USE and somewhat comparable to FreeBSD's make options for ports e.g. "NO_GUI"=true and stuff like that. I do like the USE idea though.
The interesting thing about portage as a FreeBSD user is two sided really: the pro would be that the functionality of portupgrade would be part of the portmanager tool (portage) itself, the con is that *BSD (even Net) are not a kernel with packaged userland, it is a full (perhaps small though) OS and the hard thing is always where to draw the line and whether or not the base system can and should be put into packages/ports/ebuilds also. Like any OS Gentoo Linux needs a bootstrap and a chaintool too to build the rest. LFS'ish (quite easy though, they have good docs).
The Gentoo "rc scripts" are also very NetBSD inspired and recently FreeBSD has followed this approach, e.g. using PROVIDES, and BEFORE, etc.
My (rather short) experience with portage was that I liked it, but it's definately more geared towards a linux (kernel+tools+pkgs) system. It also broke quite frequently though. And of course, python is always nice, if only to unbreak little things easily (I'm not much of a C person).
First off, I love FreeBSD. I run FreeBSD on every system I own. FreeBSD simply rules. It's so clean, compact, organized, secure, fast, stable, sweet, kick ass, and kick fucking ass; but seriously - it's not perfect. I personally think package managment needs a lot of work. The Debian packaging system is by far superior to anything out there, and with apt-get you cannot loose. Pkg-add just sucks ass compared to debians tools. And Ports just gets messy really quick. Upgrading ports is damn ugly, especially with multiple dependancies. Anything to improve managing software on BSD is a good thing. I wish someone would write an application similar to WindowsUpdate for BSD. Don't flame me! Applying patches should be that easy on BSD (Click the check-mark and press install, done!).
Package managment is probably one of the most important things to have on a system. Installing, upgrading, and removing software should be simple, reliable, and accessable. Sure, Ports may offer some of this, but there's room for improvement. Portage can teach us something. Lets learn from Portage's ass kickedness and improve ports more!
USE flags. Gimme USE flags and I will concur that ports are OK.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
As usual, when this comes up, let's plug NetBSD's Packages Collection. ``pkgsrc'', as it's known, originally derived from FreeBSD's ports is available for a large number of platforms (Netbsd, of course, and then Darwin, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris and Irix), thus allowing system administrators who have to take care of more than one OS to take advantage of its strengths. So, uhm, sorry, but I'd also have to add my vote to the ``who needs portage'' camp.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
It has come to my attention that you completely inhale the pastes in crust. Read on for more about this fascinating topic.
The world went into shock a few weeks ago when goatse.info reported the results of a study which concluded that inhaling paste is a very dangerous pastime, one that no one is advised to take up. Eventually, everyone adapted to the new state of affairs and began inhaling other things. Almost everyone, that is. But not you! According to my records, you still inhale paste!
Why?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!
You moron, you idiot, you imbecile, you gay nigger ! Arg! You make me so fucking sick! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD 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 marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I know that, I just wanted to tell that portage didn't used Makefiles to make it work.
Portage was inspired by NetBSD's pkgsrc which was derived from FreeBSD ports. Flags like PROVIDES are similar to USE and somewhat comparable to FreeBSD's make options for ports e.g. "NO_GUI"=true and stuff like that. I do like the USE idea though.
I actually didn't thought about that possibility, even thought I've used it sometimes. But sure the USE-flags is more convenient. Will make for the BSD ports complain if the option isn't available? If not i suppose it would be quite easy to do your own script which just add the options you want in BSD aswell.
The Gentoo "rc scripts" are also very NetBSD inspired and recently FreeBSD has followed this approach, e.g. using PROVIDES, and BEFORE, etc.
Never heard of PROVIDES or BEFORE earlier, will ask google about that one.
Personally I like NetBSD most, but it got nothing with ports vs portage to do, it's just that all the BSDs got excellent documentation and that NetBSD has the files in intelligent places and that you don't have to upgrade the whole OS so often. OpenBSD is ok aswell but fails a little on the desktop side, and it's nice to see FreeBSD 5.x uses gcc 3.x now adays. Currently my machine runs gentoo since a half year or something because I bought a new one back then and wanted to try it out. We'll see then I have enough time and energy to switch back.
The Even Better News (TM) than that for BSD users is, 99% of "BSD is dying" posted so far is rated with Troll, Offtopic, Flamebait, or Redundant. Hehe, trolls are really dying. :-)
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__888888b__.d888b,_d888888________88b_.d888b,
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Who is going to meta-port the 7000 (or whatever it is) ports to whatever format portage needs it's information in and then keep them up to date?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
1. You can not play games on it.
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
4. There is no support available for it.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
10.It is dying.
I have a cron job which does a daily cvsup and `portupgrade -aRr' (disclaimer: Doing this on a production server is a bad idea. Always check ports before deploying them. On a workstation, however, in the unlikely event that it breaks I can spend some time avoiding work while I figure out why:). The problem with this is that some ports (e.g. ghostscript and php) have curses based front-end for selecting make flags. This causes portupgrade to wait for user input (which never happens, since it is not run in a terminal). I would like to see each port which has tweakable options list these in a standard format. Then, a single tool could be used for editing them in an interactive way (rather than a separate, but identical interface for ports like ghostscript and php), and auto-update tools like portupgrade could remember the make settings for each port and reapply the same ones when it was upgraded.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
BSD's dead, Jim.
Did anybody tell the developers that we already have ports? (That they stole portage from, BTW). Wait, wait, we didn't have packages? No... I thought we had pkgsrc...
Why the hell do we need portage? We've already got our system. It works (for us) better than portage. We don't need it. Stop wasting your time.
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
automated dependency resolution (and a lot more) for rpm based systems: Red Carpet
and if you need something that ximian doesn't have in their database you just pull it's dependency libraries from redcarpet and build it from an srpm. things definitely aren't as tough as they used to be
I have no experience with BSD, and I'm sure ports is great, but it isn't the only game in town anymore
Don't they already exist?
viper or something?
Homer Simpson on going to Canada:
"Canada? Why should I leave America to go to America junior?"
http://www.talknerdy.org
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
Does this mean that Gentoo is dying? :)
Not to sound like a troll here, but i really dont see the point since we have a well-oiled ports system already?
If someone can explain a good reason, ficool.. but i as of yet, really dont see a point. And it can only cause issues. One nice thing about the ports tree, is its 'the' ports tree.. no confusion involved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How nice, to toss in an insult at the end.
That aside, if you had fully understood what I said. you would have realized I'm not against change. I just feel that there needs to be a valid case to consider it. I also clearly stated i did NOT know the portage system, thus looking for others to assist in the rational..
So far, you haven't given me any valid reasons, nor does the typical sounding Linux crowd's "you don't know what you are talking about so shut up" attitude that leaked thru doesn't help the case. That's one reason I left the Linux camp, after being in it since the very beginning on Usenet
Consistency and maturity are two of the main advantages of the BSD's.. The main reason I, and many others in the 'real' ( real, as in not hobby ) world have chosen or moved too, *BSD. ( and the license wars )
Fragmenting the 'ports' goes a long way to destroy that consistency, unless there is a damned good reason to do so.
Just because its 'new and improved' is NOT a reason to do it. This would bring the BSD's down to the level of today's Linux world, fragmented and convoluted, to the point of being a detriment.
Also keep in mind very few people actually understand how to use ports properly, which if done would most likely remove anyone's 'issues' with it. Its actually well thought out and extremely flexible, if used the right way.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now having said that, I agree about FreeBSD. It does rock that it's one complete operating system. I do have to point out, however, that there's a much bigger difference between OpenBSD and FreeBSD than there is between, say, Red Hat and Slackware. At least between two Linux distributions most of the kernel is the same.
this is from a Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OS X user. No need for flames.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Why would you bother porting a ports clone back to the system that spawned (and still uses) it? Why would you create a linux distribution with the intention of making it BSD-like? Why not just use a BSD?
I thought this was why slackware died.
Indeed it is common knowledge that ever hapless *BSD continues to be mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the cold numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a dizzying, head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD 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 marketing 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 hobbyist dilettante dabblers. If truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
It's de first time I browse along the *BSD news topic in SlashDot, and all that I can see is:
Why TF are all those no-brainers talking about that stupid gay-like phrase "BSD is dying!!, *BSD is dying!!"?
I'm sure that all of that "i use linux, cause i'm kool!" kiddies doesn't used any version of *BSD. And you can't criticize *BSD if you even haven't tried it. And yes, I can see many posts are from ignorant linux zealots that doesn't know nothing about *BSD. Some of these even think that *BSD doesn't run in x86!!! (what???)
What is this crap about? People in Linux camp doesn't like competitors? Is the really linux for people who hates Microsoft? And nowe they hate BSD too?
Sorry, but i don't like these attitude. I prefer go to more mature *BSD community sites.
BSDERO
It hurts 'n' stuff.