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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:45AM
This is really making me sad. All of the open source software I used to use and love is dying or dead now.
XFree86? Dead.
Firefox? Dead.
GNOME? Dead.
Perl? Dying.
GCC? Dying.
Debian? Dying.
:(
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:09AM
- XFree86? Dead.
X.org ?
- Firefox? Dead.
Are you sure?
- GNOME? Dead.
Use Gnome2? and does one need Gnome at all?
- Perl? Dying.
Are you sure?
- GCC? Dying.
Clang?
- Debian? Dying.
Slackware, Gentoo, FreeBSD?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:46AM
Neither Perl 6 nor Python 3 look super-healthy.
Meanwhile Perl 5 and Python 2 keep chuggin along.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:02AM
Perl 6 died years ago. Christ, it has been almost 15 years since it was announced, and there's still no implementation of it.
Yeah, I know about Rakudo. It's shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:28PM
You mean, it was once alive? I must have missed that.
Did they even finish specifying it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:27AM
There is no "open source community" but a roving band of corporations.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:45AM
XFree86? Not really dead, as X.org is a fork and no one worked on the original after the fork, so it's more a rename than anything else.
Firefox? Really? I use it on Android all the time. They're under pressure from Chromium to implement a proper sandboxing mechanism though, so I don't know how long they'll last.
GNOME? Possibly, I haven't used it for over five years so I've no idea what the current state is. MdI seemed intent on copying every bad idea from Microsoft and ignoring any good ones.
Perl? Maybe not as widely used as before, but cpan is still full of actively developed things. There's now competition from Python, Ruby, Lua and so on, so it's no longer a case that every problem has to be solved with C or Perl, but I don't see that having more options is bad.
GCC? Well, the license is annoying and we're now seeing the exactly how much harm the open source ecosystem suffered from GCC's refusal to put in clean layering. While GCC is still slightly beating clang on optimisation (I reluctantly admit, as an LLVM developer), LLVM is used in pretty much every other language and embedded in the graphics stack. I saw my framerate for XBMC with no GPU acceleration jump from 3fps to 30fps when I switched from the old MESA code to the LLVM softpipe driver. We could have had that kind of improvement 20 years ago if GCC had been released under a license that allowed incorporation in X drivers and with sensible layering that made such adaptation possible. Most GPU drivers are also using LLVM for optimisation, so we're now seeing the real benefits of open source: code reuse in places the original designers didn't imagine. LLVM started life as a new optimisation framework for GCC (and was offered to the FSF, who rejected it), but now it's most widely used to JIT compile shader languages (including RenderScript on Android). Even a quickly written LLVM-based JIT typically gives a speedup of 5-10 times over a well-written interpreter (30+ over a badly written interpreter).
Debian? So what, it's a distribution. They aggregate the work of others. There will always be more people willing to do that.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:10PM
"MdI seemed intent on copying every bad idea from Microsoft and ignoring any good ones. "
Sounds like a creeping featuritis init system thats been widely discussed lately.
I tell ya, EEE embrace extend extinguish is whats going on. After EEE gets far enough, some submarine patent is going to surface and its bye bye linux hello marketing FUD for the competitor. SCO 2.0
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:16PM
You seem to be forgetting that it's not an init system, but a base OS. It does contain an init system, logically, but it's certainly not limited to one, neither in practice nor by design.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:15PM
I disagree in that ...
... but I fully agree with that.
Indeed, I'd argue that by making the code intentionally hard to dissect and adapt, Stallman has effectively made gcc less free, as in less supporting of the four software freedoms he himself stated; more exactly, of the following freedom:
"The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1)."
The design of gcc means that you are actively hindered from learning how the program works, and from changing it to do your computing as you wish. This was done explicitly from the the fear that someone would use those freedoms in order to circumvent them.
Yes, you can do all those things with the source of gcc (and there are certainly people who did). But then, you also can do all those things from a normal executable, by disassembling it. It's just yet again more work.
Lesson: When trying to protect freedom, be careful not to damage it by the very measures you're trying to protect it with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:39AM
To add to what others have said, if you're really concerned about GNOME being "dead" (which it isn't; but GNOME 2) is, you'd probably be advised to go off looking for MATE, which is just a maintained version of GNOME 2. XFree86 is no loss, Firefox is running along happily enough irrespective of whether you like its UI changes or not, and declaring gcc as dying seems somewhat premature to me. I still use it fairly frequently, though I do alternate between it and clang for c/c++ work and when someone puts out a reasonable F03/08 frontend for LLVM I'll doubtless jump between that and gfortran, too.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:27PM
What? did you bother to look up it's history? X.org = xfree86. The Xfree project changed its license to one which was incompatible with the GPL. The last GPL compatible version was forked and became x.org. So xfree86 lives on as x.org and xfree86 project died the death it bought upon itself.
I loved FF for quite some time. Then it began to have more and more stability issues and a single bad page (usually flash was the culprit) would take the whole browser out. Good sandboxing does not exist meaning security is weak and is why I switched to Chrome. Chrome took the Unix fork() route and uses a multi process approach. That means each tab is its own process managed by a parent browser process. All communicate via IPC and a compromised tab can't read the memory of another tab. Firefox is vulnerable as all tabs share the same process memory space. On the modern web this is completely unacceptable. FF is looking to fix this and go the multi process route but I am not holding my breath.
It committed suicide after it developers decided to throw away everything that made gnome good and foist upon us a shell that flies in the face of good UI design. It pulled a Windows 8 before Windows 8 could. I guess the Gnome team wanted Linux to be first at something, even if was first to fail at UI design. It isn't dead but it should be.
Pearl sucks. Ever try to read someone elses perl code? There was a time when perl was all the rage but its not the only game in town. Python stole a lot of its thunder. Nothing lasts forever, better things come along. Get over it.
Yea, you might want to think about that a bit more. GCC still beats clang in terms of optimization, and in many cases, generated code is faster than clang/llvm. Plus it is mature and supports just about every processor arch out there. But, competition is always good. Does GCC have problems? Of course it does. But that dont mean its dying. The push to move OS X and FreeBSD to Clang/LLVM is because the license is more permissible than the GPL. So it fits their eco system better. We are also close to building the Linux kernel with Clang/LLVM too. Only a matter of time.
Plenty of life in Debian. Stop being an alarmist. The GNU/Hurd and GNU/kfreebsd ports might be dropped as they are niche projects (systemd is also helping). It's nice that Debian put effort into them, but you can't spread yourself thin. Sometimes the hard decision has to be made and projects axed. I played with both Hurd and kfreebsd and I really like the idea of kfreebsd. Too bad. But, this is open source world. They can be picked up and maintained by others. This isn't Microsoft where EOL means goodbye forever.
There is a pill for that :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:07PM
"but you can't spread yourself thin. Sometimes the hard decision has to be made and projects axed."
Debian is a volunteer org and if you want to work on kfreebsd you will. Its very hard to actively stop a maintainer. If someone finds a way successfully to stop you, almost certainly you just "full stop", not move over to the emacs team, unless you wanted to anyway.
The release team can put up a list of minimums to meet a cutoff for something they're doing (such as, coordinating a release)
The problem kfreebsd is having, is not having enough volunteers to handle the workload of reaching the minimums and/or the interpretation of what the minimums should be may or may not be fair and/or the interpretation of where they are WRT the minimums at this time and in the near future around release time. But it has almost nothing to do with "the boss told you to work on XYZ and now you're on the ABC project"
Something that confuses the culture is at least some devs work for an employer who tells them what to do, both labor (obviously) and rumored for voting. So its not totally free will for everyone involved, but it is for most people.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:49PM
It's a matter of democracy not actually being the best way to organize the politics of every type of project under the sun. For human civilizations? It's terrible, but all workable alternatives we have have been worse. For software? All it takes is something getting popular for the democratic process to utterly kill most any project. Technocracy might be worth fearing in civic government, but it is an absolute necessity if you're going to have a remotely healthy software project. And when it's free software, you don't have to feel like you're depriving someone of their say, because if they have an idea, nothing stops them from forking your codebase and improving the diversity of options available, bringing more open competition to the world.
Instead, we have projects like Debian, where democracy worked for years, falling victim to its own success as the hipsters rip away every last vestige of the once great distribution. Meanwhile, it's stodgy old Slackware with it's dictator for life that has been getting all of the praise. Sometimes, we need to remember that one of the freedoms granted by free software is freedom to make a unilateral decision without asking everyone else for permission to do so. Failure to do so will bring more slowdowns with development while bickering and debate rages on about what should be done (while nothing actually gets done), as well as manipulation and propaganda campaigns bringing about problems of monoculture such as systemd has been bringing to more and more distributions and more and more aspects of those distributions since it was shat into the world.