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Debian Elevates KFreeBSD Port to First-Class Status
Reader tail.man points out this press release from Debian which says that the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel will be given equal footing alongside Debian's several other release ports, starting with the release of Squeeze. Excerpting from this release:
"The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical. Debian's main motivation for the inclusion of the FreeBSD kernel into the official release process is the opportunity to offer to its users a broader choice of kernels and also include a kernel that provides features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel with full support."
This is a really cool thing, except that I wonder how much this is going to be used? I'm sure there's a group of people who will be interested in this, and it might be a great stepping stone for those that want to move to/from FreeBSD to/from Linux, but a lot of the FreeBSD community is heavily focused on the fact that FreeBSD is developed as a complete OS. The userland and the kernel are developed by the same people and integrated. So while this is exciting, I'm not sure how much interest you're going to get from the FreeBSD community. Similarly, a lot of the Linux people who use Debian don't think of using Debian but think of using Linux, Debian just happens to be the distribution they choose.
Now, what may be interesting that'll come out of this is packages with better FreeBSD compatibility. That is something I look forward to.
First apt based distro with ZFS? Something worthy of a post about...
I know about Nexenta, but FreeBSD has more drivers than OpenSolaris, right?
You seem to be asking some interesting questions, but fail to do so in a timely fashion.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why would you not want to use APT on a server? What part of automatic dependency handling, automatic unneeded package pruning, easy security update application, and secure package retrieval do you not want on your servers?
Possibly the "automatic unneeded package pruning". It could be dangerous if your custom apps don't specify their dependencies correctly (say, they rely on something that had been automatically installed by one of their other dependencies).
Unless the elected leaders of Debian all go insane at the same time, not very likely.
Far less. If Debian were to ever go BSD as its primary license (see point one), somewhere in the vicinity of 90% of its contributors would leave, probably to start a new GPL-ed distribution.
Inclusion of the BSD kernel is not the same as an adoption of the BSD philosophy, as the kernel is an interchangeable component of the whole, very much like the much maligned Hurd is, of which there is also a Debian-based experimental distro.
Debian is in effect raising BSD from the dead. IMO it's a good thing, the more OSes there are, the better.
If being made into the un-dead means becoming more like GNU/Linux, I'd rather just keep me and my demonic servers six feet under please.
And this happens now on BOTH sides of the fence, so mixing this improves the situation how? I see it making it worse if anything.
Software that compiles and installs on BOTH BSD and Linux, has not been all that unusual since, perhaps, 1991-1992.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"nearly here". No other words can strike such fear into the heart of a production system sysadmin. How about something that's seen production use for years, instead?
Do we need Linux any more, now that HURD is nearly here, based on the same ideas but with Linux's design problems known about and worked around?
Wow, you got modded Troll and Timothy got modded Offtopic for describing a legitimate concern. Man, this place has gone downhill.
The correct rebuttal to your statement is that you don't mess with things on production machines. You don't uninstall that third package. If you want to make changes like that, you do it on your test machine first. Timothy was concerned with packages dropping dependencies, but that shouldn't happen within -stable.
I really don't get why Debian would do this though because of the fact that it will take away from its primary user base (Linux users) to help fill a possible niche of users (KFreeBSD users) that are small in number.
That type of question makes sense when asked about Microsoft, but doesn't even make sense when discussing Debian. "Why would Debian do this" is like a zen koan, until you're enlightened it makes no sense, or when it makes sense it means you're enlightened.
Debian developers do what they want to do, within the legal framework and societal tolerance. If the guys doing the port, feel like doing the port, they do the port, and we get a "testing" quality port, and if its good enough, TPtB declare it a release-quality architecture and we eventually get a "stable" quality release. There is no "Debian" borg style hive mind, or if one does exist, instead of "the three laws of robotics" or "the ferengi laws of acquisition", the hive mind has the social contract and the DFSG. There is no top down militaristic business command structure. Very few people in Debian with positions of power have the "wikipedia" attitude of "I'm not personally interested in your work, so I shall gleefully destroy it while laughing, ha ha ha".
In summary, they felt like doing it, they did it, some folks in positions of power acknowledge it. Its the same deal for all Debian packages, this port is not getting "special" treatment.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think you're confusing "important part of an operating system" with an operating system. Linux is definitely not an operating system, it's just a common term to refer to Linux-based operating systems (because the average person doesn't care). Just like the FreeBSD kernel alone isn't an operating system. Debian and FreeBSD are operating systems. GNU appears to be a complete operating system (although not finished). I think you can install it from here: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/running/gnu.html.
Need a simple proof that Linux isn't an operating system? Download the kernel and boot it (oh wait, you can't because GRUB isn't part of the kernel), do some stuff on the command line (bash is not part of the kernel either), maybe update some programs (apt isn't part of the kernel). Oh wait you say, I don't need apt, I can just download the source and compile it myself... but wget and gcc aren't part of the kernel either.
And don't take this to mean I think we should call it GNU/Linux. People can call their operating system whatever they want. If they wanted every piece of software that uses GNU to be called GNU/Software, it should be in the license. My point is just that kernel != operating system.
Sure.
Options are to keep the autoremoval turned off, or build simple custom packages for your third-party aps with the proper dependencies.
Or you could do without any package management entirely. That doesn't strike me as likely to make anybody safer....
Raises hand.
The only time when I've worried about running (Debian) stable software on production servers has been towards the end of a releases' life.
In that case signatures for things like clamav were often useless. However right now I'm running entirely stable software and don't expect that to change for the forseeable future.
A lot of people seem to want the latest and greatest releases of software for no appreciable reason. (If they were hitting specific bugs I'd understand ..)