According to an email sent to the Debian debian-devel-announce mailing list by Adam D. Barratt, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port is in grave danger of being dropped from the upcoming Debian 8 "Jessie" release. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD runs the GNU userland tools, the GNU C library and the Debian package set on top of the FreeBSD kernel.
Barratt states:
We remain gravely concerned about the viability of this port. Despite the reduced scope, we feel that the port is not currently of sufficient quality to feature as a fully supported release architecture in Jessie.
We therefore advise the kFreeBSD porters that the port is in danger of being dropped from Jessie, and invite any porters who are able to commit to working on the port in the long term to make themselves known *now*.
We will assess the viability of kFreeBSD in Jessie on or after 1st November, and a yes/no decision will be taken at that time.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:34AM
I mean, isn't GNU just another term for Linux?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:36AM
Also, is this the work of those feminists that I keep hearing have supplanted all the devs for Debian?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by velex on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:47PM
My tinfoil is on rather tight today. I'd appreciate it if the person putting forward that theory would please substantiate it. (For those not browsing at -1, the theory is that systemd and other "rot" is a feminist conspiracy.)
I love a good conspiracy theory, but this seems too far-fetched. Feminism is content to go "all men this," "all men that" and push for sexist policies, but actually being involved in the open source community at a level that could get these changes implemented seems far-fetched. Now, I have accused Poettering of being a white knight a few times, so that would be an attack vector, but I just don't see a motive here.
At least, I don't see why this conspiracy theory would make sense. Those of us who have absolutely no intention of running systemd will simply route around systemd. Distros come and go, but free software abides. Remember Mandrake? (Granted, it is disturbing that Debian of all distros is being affected.)
I'm aware of outreach efforts to encourage women to join the open source community, and some of those haven't gone so well. I'm mostly ambivalent about those. More women in the open source community is a good thing. However, the "bring a horse to water" principle applies.
It also seems that projects such as Ubuntu that are associated with those efforts (Canonical) are where the "rot" comes from (e.g. Unity, GNOME 3, systemd, Amazon search on the desktop just to be handy!). So, I can see a connection.
Of course, I'm a happy Gentoo and Ratpoison [wikipedia.org][1] user, so I haven't been affected by all this.
([1] My Linux from Scratch build blew up after compiling binutils in chroot! Next step before reaching E19 is to figure out why make check is failing.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:06AM
You might want to read this https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html [gnu.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mtrycz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:07AM
Short story:
GNU created open-source alternatives to closed-source programs from the unix era, containing most of a base OS (and more) *except* the kernel. Then Throvalds stepped in and made a kernel. The whole OS is called GNU/Linux, meaning base OS utils with a Linux kernel. You can also have GNU/Hurd, meaning base OS utils with a Hurd kernel (while Linux is a macrokernel, Hurd is a microkernel), and a number of other alternatives. GNU utils have a clearly defined, stable API (coming from before GNU), and is also portable to, for eg., FreeBSD.
Currently, with corporate sponsoring form the Red Hat, GNU/Linux is being gradually substituted with systemd/Linux (gradually refering to: the amount of utils rewritten and the rate of adoption in the open).
The philosophy of systemd/Linux is very much against all the principles of unix philosophy (the way poeple have operated their systems for decades, and for real life proven reasons). Also systemd is notably not compatible with FreeBSD, or anything alse, it's declared Linux specific.
While it's true that systemd is open source, it's creating a closed system, deliberately doing so.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!