New update on Gentoo/FreeBSD status: the first important news is that we have a sys-apps/freebsd-rescue now, that populates the /rescue directory as in a vanilla FreeBSD!
I had to hack it a bit but now works fine. remember that nis and atm needs to be enabled also for other part of the system or they’ll kill you 🙂
FWIW, now libarchive installs a dynamic library, too, this should simplify the upgrade process in the future.
About Java, instead, after my yesterday rant, I started looking at what we can do and I found patches for FreeBSD support with the source build of Sun’s JDK. This ebuild was gone out of the tree some time ago and Java herd confirmed that working with them is a no-go as they have a bad viral license that nobody wants to deal with.
Following Betelgeuse and compnerd suggestions, I’m waiting for gcj to be able to build openoffice and I’m going to try kaffe as java provider for Gentoo/FreeBSD users. The problem with disabling Java support entirely is that OpenOffice for example requires it and for an user-oriented FreeBSD distribution it’s not so good not having OpenOffice at all :/
Regards the profiles, instead, I did a big cleanup of all of the ones in the overlay. I removed the old artifacts due to the overlay nature of g/fbsd 5.3, and I’ve merged most of the 5.4 data into the fbsd parent profile to be shared with the future 6.0.
I’ve removed the provided packages, all the packages that tries to install one of the Linux-specific packages have broken depends and instead of being fooled needs to be fixed. You’ll find a couple of ebuilds on the overlay to avoid having errors for packages such as xorg with depends on util-linux and so on. The patches for all them are on bugzilla but are not merged in tree for now, as soon as they are merged the ebuilds in overlay are going to fade away.
