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libc5-based Debian GNU/FreeBSD

libc5-based Debian GNU/FreeBSD is a port that consists of a FreeBSD kernel, kernel-related utilities, C Library and a few specific utilities, coupled with the "regular" Debian (GNU) userland. The port is currently based on Intel x86 architecture only.

The primary port maintainer is Nathan Hawkins.

There were packages available but the public copy is no longer available due to a server lost in fire. Due to this and some other unfortunate circumstances, the progress on the port is presently stalled.

Please refer to the closely related NetBSD port page for more historic information.

Status

Last updated 4/22/2002

The key parts of FreeBSD are packaged, and the base system is mostly functional, however there are several outstanding issues:

Problems with specific packages

sysvinit is patched and working, but there are problems getting the patches into a state where they can be merged without breaking Linux.
shadow is badly hacked, and needs major work. Update: Did some major work. The situation is almost decent now. Needs more testing.
apt-get segfaults a lot. It seems to work most of the time on source packages, but fails reliably for binaries. Update: this is fixed now
groff: won't build the current version, due to internationalization problem with libc. Update: fixed when langinfo.h was MFC'ed.
gcc/binutils: something is keeping gcc -g from actually including debugging information. It's probably binutils, and it probably has some other things wrong with it. Update: working now. strange...
util-linux: total basket case. I gave up and made a new package, util-bsd.
e2fsprogs: doesn't build, probably isn't going to anytime soon.

General problems with the port

libc doesn't contain -lintl. A lot of packages don't check for this, and every one requires patching.
getopt and some other -liberty functions aren't in libc. A lot of the Debian-specific packages are broken by this. Update: I ported the NetBSD getopt_long over, and it seems to work fine. Looks like this one may be solved.
No multi-byte character set functions. Breaks building UTF support in libncurses, and some other packages. Update: libiconv is packaged. It may make a difference here.
Totally different implementation of shadow passwords. BSD 4.4 apparently introduced an incompatible way of doing it. It may actually be better, but there are no standard library functions for dealing with it. getspnam and friends don't exist. Update: this is fixed. I wrote a library, libshadow, and it solved the problem.
Use of libc6-dev in package build deps. This needs to stop!
Use of gcc 3.0. This should become less of a problem, as other ports are based on it.
Need a unique host type for configure. FreeBSD configurations are sometimes wrong for Debian, and it would be nice to be able to avoid breaking FreeBSD with changes for Debian. The biggest problem is with libtool.