Gentoo Archives: gentoo-osx

From: Kito <kito@g.o>
To: gentoo-osx@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-osx] Some Introduction
Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2005 17:48:55
Message-Id: 4125D02A-C3C9-4BFD-AC42-EBAEDA87C8A7@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-osx] Some Introduction by Grobian
1 On Aug 7, 2005, at 5:22 AM, Grobian wrote:
2
3 > Hi all,
4
5 Hi!
6
7
8 > In the small week that I've been officially on the staff now, I was
9 > confronted with many small things that made me ponder. Before
10 > going into a long mail, I'll apologise upfront for my English, it's
11 > horrible.
12
13 Don't sell yourself short, your english is pretty damn good IMHO =)
14
15
16 > At the moment I have the terrible feeling of being useless, doing
17 > nothing struggling with everything that gets on my path.
18 >
19
20 You've only been here a week. There is no hurry, you will get
21 familiar with all the things you need to...Its opensource development
22 so people tend to work on their areas of interest.
23
24 > I'm not really an IRC guy. I know what it is, but in general it's
25 > great in distracting you and stopping you from doing what you have
26 > to do. Due to my time zone, I usually miss the important
27 > discussions too. Hence, I'm thinking of a drastical reduction of
28 > my IRC online time. I have the feeling most of the OSX staff is in
29 > the #-osx channel, but it simply doesn't work out so well for me.
30 > I prefer the asynchronous way of email, it also allows me to take
31 > some more time to type a response. As a non-native English typer,
32 > I need more time to come up with responses. And usually, it's time
33 > zone free! ;)
34
35 Well I'll be sad to not see you in #-osx as much :(
36
37 >
38 > I got a fuzzy image of what the OSX team currently consists of.
39 > It's far from a unity, more a group of people somewhere related
40 > because of a shared OS, most of the time. Personally I'm a bit
41 > lost in what the general consensus would be among the team
42 > members. Maybe there isn't even one. There is progressive,
43 > darwin, osx, etc. the arch ppc-macos seems to be a multi-headed
44 > dragon.
45 >
46 > My vision on Portage for OSX is exactly what the name says; portage
47 > on OSX, thus a portage instance next to the original OS, so I can
48 > enjoy the flexibility and package availability of portage and the
49 > sweetness of my OS. I am willing to accept that I can't install
50 > autofs on a Mac OS X machine. Maybe it sucks, but then you better
51 > install Linux on it afterall. A Mac is different, thinks
52 > different, and yet, well... maybe I just like that. In portage
53 > terms this is called "collission-protect". Great!
54 >
55 > Now it seems to me, after paying careful attention to some of the
56 > comments made in the #-osx channel that this vision of mine, which
57 > equals the current 'distribution' I think, can be considered the
58 > unwanted child in the Gentoo family. Ok, it will be always a
59 > bastard child, like Portaris would be, but someone started with
60 > this idea, and got it into portage somehow. How did this whole
61 > thing emerge within the Gentoo community, and what happened
62 > afterwards to get into the stage it is in now?
63
64 Daniel Robbins the Gentoo founder did the initial port to OS X,
65 Pieter van den Abeele (Found of Gentoo/ppc) released the first pkg
66 installer, setup what little infrastructure the OS X team has and
67 actually started recruiting devs and getting stuff in the tree. It
68 all happened very quickly and half-assed, a lot of people were pushed
69 through the recruitment/mentoring process(myself included) ,the tree
70 was broken many many times(myself included), resulting in Gentoo as a
71 whole hating the OS X project(myself included). Most people since
72 then have fallen off the project, be it out of shame (several went to
73 gentoo/ppc), lack of interest(several disappeared all together), or
74 on to bigger and better things (Pieter is working on some very cool
75 stuff with freescale/genesii as well as the opensolaris project).
76
77 Which pretty much brings us to where we are today....4-5 of us left
78 wandering around aimlessly.
79
80 >
81 > Ok, this probably all sounds a bit depressing, or put differently,
82 > quite unpromissing. However, all I need for now is some guide into
83 > the wilderness I guess. What are the (common) targets of the
84 > team? What is it 'we' want to achieve? Who thinks what?
85
86 Well, my basic feeling is the current method of trying to accommodate
87 Apple supplied userland is futile, its working against the advantages
88 of the portage tree. All the apps in portage are tested/tweaked/
89 hacked/patched/whatever to work with THE APPS IN PORTAGE, not with
90 3rd party software supplied by arbitrary vendors. In other words, the
91 path of least resistance is allowing portage to do what it does best,
92 manage software that is has knowledge of, instead of us constantly
93 lying to it about deps,etc. i.e. when an ebuild has DEPEND="app-
94 shells/bash", that means it depends on the bash in portage, if you
95 have the bash from BeOS/FC4/FBSD/Darwin/NewOS/Whatever its not
96 supported, and likely to cause problems somewhere down the line...
97
98
99 So, am I saying portage on OS X is a dumb idea? Hell no. Am I saying
100 the only way I see it working is overwriting Apple files? Hell no.
101
102 My personal goals for the project in order of my interest:
103
104 A self-hosting Darwin OS build-able and maintainable via portage
105
106 A custom Darwin/OS X installer for specialty applications with
107 portage managing the data (small footprint, SEDarwin/OS X, custom
108 userlands, Kiosks, etc.)
109
110 A fast, up to date binary package repo ala Fink that installs its
111 software in an arbitrary prefix
112
113 Each one of these goals is quite a large subject and beyond the scope
114 of this email, but hopefully you get the idea of where my interests
115 lie...
116
117 The first 2 goals, I work on now, mostly with help from people
118 outside of Gentoo. The last one, is the biggie and requires a lot of
119 work both on the actual ebuilds as well as portage itself. The good
120 news is it *is* being worked on for the next major portage
121 release.....but still a ways off regardless.
122
123 Sooooo, I guess you can tell I have no interest in the current method
124 of installing things to / or /usr and constantly trying sidestep,
125 hack around, and accomodate portage apps co-existing with the apple
126 userland. Its not practical, is very short sighted, will continue to
127 pollute the tree with ugly unnecessary cruft, and will never have the
128 support of Gentoo as a whole IMHO.
129
130 I by no means think all of our porting efforts thus far are wasted,
131 as when/if portage has support for prefixed installs, alot of the
132 grunt work of getting things building on Darwin/OS X will already
133 have been done.
134
135 >
136 > Last, but not least, to get a small impression of the people in
137 > this team, I would like a (very) short intro of those people that I
138 > haven't met yet (if there are any ;) )
139 >
140 > I hope somehow to become a valuable/active member of the team, but
141 > so far I think I haven't had the opportunity to do so.
142
143 I've no doubt you are a huge asset to the project, regardless of
144 where your niche is/might be.
145
146 --Kito
147
148 >
149 >
150 > --
151 > Fabian Groffen
152 > eBuild && Porting
153 > Gentoo for Mac OS X
154 > --
155 > gentoo-osx@g.o mailing list
156 >
157 >
158
159 --
160 gentoo-osx@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-osx] Some Introduction Finn Thain <fthain@××××××××××××××××.au>