Re: Merging Net/Free/Open-BSD together against Linux

[ADRIAN Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com>]

On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Greg Lehey wrote:

> > 	The basic reason I'm pursuing the notion of userland unification
> > is that I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the egos are smaller and less
> > likely to be a problem outside of the kernel.  It would also leave the
> > respective camps free to have their own add-ons.  This would be one way to
> > reduce the effort spend tracking what the other groups are doing for the
> > entire distribution.
> 
> You've forgotten something that went by a day or so ago: the source
> trees are structured differently, and the licenses aren't quite the
> same.  In these areas you'll run into an amount of stubbornness^W
> reluctance to change which might surprise you.

	Yes, I'm aware of the differences.  That is clearly significant
obstacle that would need to be overcome.  Like I said, I'm willing to be
egos in userland are smaller.  And as FreeBSD goes multi-platform, it may
have to make some of the same layout changes that NetBSD and OpenBSD made
anyhow. 

> > 	I could see things where 90% of userland, and 90% of the ports
> > (not packages) could be lumped together on a single CD, that could be
> > included in each OS's distribution.  The particular flavor would provide
> > it's kernel sources, system binaries and other bits that are truly kernel
> > specific.
> 
> Well, since you mention the ports, there's an idea.  I know that
> FreeBSD and NetBSD have a certain amount of object code compatibility;
> I expect that applies to OpenBSD as well.  A thing that *really* would
> be worth doing would be smoothing the differences, which would
> probably require some modifications on all three systems.  The result,
> though, would be that the ports (which Walnut Creek already ships
> precompiled) would work on any of the three platforms.  And if you
> prefer the NetBSD dump(8) over the FreeBSD version, there'd be nothing
> to stop you.
> 
> Greg

	Compatability at the ports level could surely be improved, but
don't you think improving compatability at the /usr level would ease
improving the compatability of the ports area?  Without addressing /usr,
you are faced with manging several sets of patches for many ports. 
Unifying /usr would restrict the multiple patch problem to kernel/system
API specific packages. 

	Adrian
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