… to boldly port what no developer ported before.
So, if you read Planet Gentoo you seen that Donnie added Fedora/RedHat tools in portage this is quite interesting, although I won’t be using them myself (I prefer them to *Ubuntu stuff, but I’m a CLI person for configuration).
What could be the limit of porting those? Not counting the architecture where Fedora is not ported and thus they are likely not working, I’d like to give a try to port them on Gentoo/FreeBSD 🙂
I know most of them most likely use /proc stuff that makes them totally useless on FreeBSD, but it’s always free to try, isn’t it? Besides, depending how stubborn upstream is, they might accept patches, and that would allow to have the same interface even if the code is quite different. I know it’s silly, it’s pointless, it’s stupid, and I’m pretty sure Donnie will tell me I’m an idiot just for thinking about this (and he won’t help me with the port, I’m sure, nor will apply patches if upstream will most likely not accept them). But okay, if you think I’m an idiot to think that Free Software can be adapted to different situation and improve the life of all the users, make it so, I’m not getting offended.. I know that is silly rationale.
On a more effective notice, the protoize bug returned to life, and this time I disabled it for good, it’s not building by default on Gentoo/FreeBSD and I’d rather see it disabled than having it break GCC building every other semester, especially considering the importance of GCC in Gentoo. In my opinion, it should have get its own ebuild.
I also have a patch that allows openssl 0.9.8c to build on Gentoo/FreeBSD, but seems like the problem is limited to FreeBSD and my Linux system, I have to check that more deeply. I finally fixed cdparanoia build too, so now the deptree can be considered fixed.
I’d have to fix coreutils-6.1 that does not build, there are other things I have to cleanup here and there, there’s again the sandbox problem with libtool we haven’t had a solution yet. The work on Gentoo/FreeBSD is all but complete, but at least it’s proceeding.
Sounds like fun, but you might want to make sure they work right on Linux before trying them on something else. =)