Arch/NetBSD?

nanosleep · 2009-08-20 20:11:13

I think it's safe to say, everyone that uses arch quickly falls in love with its userland. I'm sure that many of us have little non-i686/amd64 devices that are still capable of running a *nix quite happily. It's also a fair assumption that if you could run arch on those devices, you would.. right? Well.. You can probably see where I'm going with this, but on the offchance you haven't, netbsd runs on practically everything (seriously, from atari falcons, to sharp zauruses, and everywhere in between).

What do you guys think the community interest would be in porting arch's userland to nbsd? I'd absolutely love to have pacman/abs on an HP Jornada, or on a Linksys NSLU2. Even if we have only have base in binary packages, and then everything else in abs (or, hell, just the ability to use PKGBUILDS), it'd still be amazing. I've seen some of the arch porting projects.. and it seems like we're spreading ourselves pretty thin. Why not focus our efforts on nbsd, work on making pacman as portable as possible, and use the more source-based approach of NetBSD?

Anyway, I'm rambling.. I just wanted to know if anyone would be down for giving this a shot. I'm considering sinking some money into a VPS and a domain, if there's enough interest.

sand_man · 2009-08-20 22:30:57

This kind of thing has come up before. I see you are willing to donate money which is nice of you but a project like this actually needs someone to be able to do the work involved. If you want this to happen, you will at least need to show a proof of concept and actually get people interested in helping you rather than just offering to donate money.
Chances are, this thread will go no where.

nanosleep · 2009-08-21 03:42:42

but a project like this actually needs someone to be able to do the work involved

fukawi2 · 2009-08-21 04:49:49

Does *BSD have a slightly different filesystem layout to Arch? All packages would have to be modified to install to slightly different locations?

EDIT: I have a VPS with some free space and lots of free bandwidth that could possibly host some stuff if you wanted...

Last edited by fukawi2 (2009-08-21 04:50:18)

AdrenalineJunky · 2009-08-21 04:55:21

considering that the linux kernel supports just about all processor achitectures anyway, wouldn't it be simpler to just start supporting more architectures then porting then entire thing over and then support more architectures?

rizzix · 2009-08-21 06:30:22

I just think it's nice to have more options than to limit our selves to just the Linux kernel. This sounds like a great idea.

shining · 2009-08-21 06:53:03

Some people have already tried to use pacman tools on bsd/macosx, and several portability fixes were made over the past few years.
So now everything should work fine. It just requires a lot of manpower and resources to maintain a tree of pkgbuilds.
see http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=53960&p=1 / http://arch-osx.twilightlair.net/reposi … w/arch-osx

Apparently the only problem concerning pacman was the (optional) use of libdownload. with pacman 3.3 we moved to netbsd libfetch, so that should not even be a problem anymore.

any portability problems should be reported to http://bugs.archlinux.org/ (pacman section), when our bug tracker is back from death.

Last edited by shining (2009-08-21 06:53:56)

sand_man · 2009-08-21 10:56:33

nanosleep wrote:

but a project like this actually needs someone to be able to do the work involved
http://www.igneous.ws/imagehost/images/1250820613.png
http://www.igneous.ws/imagehost/images/1250826128.png

haha one step ahead

well done, I hope this sparks some interest.

nanosleep · 2009-08-21 14:09:03

fukawi2 wrote:

Does *BSD have a slightly different filesystem layout to Arch? All packages would have to be modified to install to slightly different locations?

The filesystem hierarchy is indeed fairly different in NetBSD.. however, I'm going to make an attempt to rearrange the hierarchy to be more like arch's. I'm also going to be replacing the bsd userland with GNU coreutils, since abs is having a fair deal of issues at the moment (Probably all due to using bsd utils). Anyway, once I go from bsdutils->coreutils and rearrange the fs (actually simpler than it sounds), I will be able to start making pkgbuilds and pacman packages specifically for nbsd.

fukawi2 wrote:

EDIT: I have a VPS with some free space and lots of free bandwidth that could possibly host some stuff if you wanted...

If you really don't mind, sometime in the near future, I may contact you. I will probably need a place to store pkgbuilds and i386 packages. As you can see from my screenshot, pacman is working just fine, so it's basically just a matter of building packages now

AdrenalineJunky wrote:

considering that the linux kernel supports just about all processor architectures anyway, wouldn't it be simpler to just start supporting more architectures then porting then entire thing over and then support more architectures?

My only problem with that is, it seems like the arch community has tried that in one form or another (see arch-ppc), and the project doesn't quite stay as current as anyone would like. With netbsd, we port the tools to netbsd, and they should theoretically compile on the majority of their supported architectures. All we would have to do is provide a working environment for pacman/makepkg/abs (which is *almost* already complete).. At that point all we would need is base and base-devel for the various arches, and then just allow everyone to use the preexisting pkgbuilds for extra/community repos + the aur.

I guess you could do the same thing with Linux, but it just seems like extra work. With Arch/NetBSD, we'd be taking a preexisting binary distribution that works on *everything* (including esoteric x86 hardware I have which refuses to work with linux) and just slightly transforming it and adding the arch userland. It's a lot less work, which in turn will probably make it easier to maintain for a wide array of architectures.

Here in a few days, I will be providing some scripts for NetBSD->Arch/NetBSD transformation, for those interested.

Last edited by nanosleep (2009-08-21 14:10:17)

mianka · 2009-08-21 20:03:40

nanosleep,

had you ever alook at t2-linux?

sorry: http://www.t2-project.org/

Last edited by mianka (2009-08-21 20:05:55)

kolbycrouch · 2009-11-30 13:42:21

having used netbsd somewhat extensively, i can see that some people dont quite know what they are talking about sometimes.
you are not really going to be able to change the filesystem hierarchy of netbsd or any OS for that matter. in the PKGBUILDS(whats used to build arch packages)
it specifies the prefix dir (/usr) changing all these wouldnt be that hard.

Linux does not run on all hardware architectures, and many people confuse, it runs on it, and, it runs on it well. Example, all the freebsd ports except amd64(which is close enough to x86 anyways) suck pretty bad as the OS is very hard-grained on only running on the pc architecture. Netbsd however runs great on about 60 architectures, anyone see the toaster with an ARM chip in it?
what you talking about in theory is nice but it just wont happen, debian has a debian/knetbsd project that isnt worth anything, hell the kfreebsd isnt that great, and there is alot more people into that.
you will need too many people who are very knowledged with the way arch works, the gnu userland, and most unfortunately, netbsd.

sorry to sound like a downer, because im all for inovation, but sometimes it isnt all that reasonable.

Lets get arch ported to the HURD first, lol.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-08-20 20:11:13

Arch/NetBSD?

#2 2009-08-20 22:30:57

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#3 2009-08-21 03:42:42

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#4 2009-08-21 04:49:49

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#5 2009-08-21 04:55:21

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#6 2009-08-21 06:30:22

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#7 2009-08-21 06:53:03

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#8 2009-08-21 10:56:33

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#9 2009-08-21 14:09:03

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#10 2009-08-21 20:03:40

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

#11 2009-11-30 13:42:21

Re: Arch/NetBSD?

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