matthew green wrote:
1) Modify the kernel build so uname -v includes "Debian" - this is apretty trivial change. It does present problems if people build kernels on their own - one option would be to make sure that the kernel build system ensures that this is set. i think this will only cause things to be more broken when people aren't running the right kernel.. it also just seems Wrong to me.
I'm already patching the sources for quite a few things that will probably never be accepted by FreeBSD. A good example would be different group names. I have patches that essentially are s/wheel/root/g, because Debian calls group 0 root, not wheel.
Another example would be installing various build tools like BSD make into /usr/bsd instead of /usr/bin. I then patch several shell scripts, and also sources for make to point to /usr/bsd/bin/sh instead of /bin/sh, because on Debian /bin/sh is bash.
Without doing these patches, the build fails, because FreeBSD's build system takes it for granted that it's running on FreeBSD. However, I'm not making any changes that actually affect the kernel. Most of the patches I'm applying are against Makefiles.
All these patches are shipped in the Debian source package as diffs against the source from CVS, so it's pretty easy to see what was changed. It's actually quite similar to how ports work on BSD.
2) config.guess currently produces i386-unknown-netbsdelf1.5. Under Linux, this is i386-pc-linux-gnu. Adding i386-unknown-netbsdelf1.5-gnu (or possibly even just i386-unknown-netbsd-gnu), determined by the different uname output, would allow for Debian-specific alterations to be made which could be included upstream without breaking anything else. i like i386-unknown-netbsd-gnu or i386-unknown-netbsd-debian. i'd ask the config.guess maintainers what _they_ feel about this..
config.guess maintainers will most likely want -gnu. I'd rather have -debian, because I consider my OS to be Debian, not GNU. But I'll probably go along with it rather than fight over it with the config.guess maintainers. Then 3 months later, I'll probably get into a vicious flame-war with FreeBSD people over it.
Politics. :( ---Nathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bsd-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org