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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the needs-a-systemd-port dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:27PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:27PM (#103593) Journal

    XFree86? Dead.

    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.

    Firefox? Dead.

    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.

    GNOME? Dead.

    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.

    Perl? Dying.

    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.

    GCC? Dying.

    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.

    Debian? Dying.

    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 :)

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:07PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:07PM (#103612)

    "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.