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: 2) by forsythe on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:42PM
Thanks for the explanation - this addresses the post I already made in the story that prevents me from modding you up.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:10PM
Watching the innards of Debian while a release is hatched is analogous to watching sausage being made. I had a good analogy going with pink slime but we're all better off with me leaving it out. Everything in the post was 100% factual other than the conjecture at the end. I would imagine the release of FreeBSD 10.0 with pkg functionality took a lot of wind out of the debian-kfreebsd sails.
Imagine if Debian threatened to port apt-get into Windows as a supported arch (sounds insane, but not impossible) and before they're done, Microsoft actually put their own apt-get into winders 10.0 to head them off at the pass. Madness.