[1961] in NetBSD-Development
Re: Athena packages suitable for pkgsrc
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Fri Jun 23 13:43:55 2000
To: matt <deberg@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>, netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "23 Jun 2000 10:44:12 EDT."
<knh66r0ihj7.fsf@chamomile.deberg.org>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 13:43:43 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 6/23 you wrote:
> Richard> So, I have been considering the plight of NetBSD-Athena. I
> Richard> think that it is a losing proposition to try and be the
> Richard> default i386-Athena, since tb-Athena seems to have that
> Richard> niche locked up. However I think supporting users who
> Richard> really want to use NetBSD with Athena services is a
> Richard> worthwhile goal, especially if we can do it on multiple
> Richard> architecture. To that end it seems that generating
> Richard> pkgsrc-style packages for various Athena services,
> Richard> comparable to how Layered Athena breaks Athena services
> Richard> into multiple packages.
>
> what is the "plight" of netbsd-athena? we've been lame about getting a
> release out, and at this point i wonder if it's not worth just skipping
> 8.3 and doing 8.4, but i don't think it's ever been a goal to "beat out"
> either SIPB or I/S linux-athena. regardless of the state of any
> linux-athena port, i want to be using netbsd.
Ok, that probably qualifies as the most impolitic mail I have sent
this month (and I am a pretty tactless person). s/plight/status/. Two
years ago when I got here NetBSD-Athena was the correct solution for
clueless people (clueless == people who can't tell the difference
between Linux and NetBSD) who wanted to run Athena on their Intel
machine. It is possible that this just happened, rather than being a
goal of the developers.
> i believe netbsd-athena 8.3 for both i386 and sparc are close to being
> ready to go, and now that i've finished my thesis i plan on putting in
> the time this summer to make those happen. (or something 8.4 based, or
> whatever.)
What I was really trying to say was that we might get most or all of
the benefit of NetBSD-Athena by only offering packages, rather than
trying to auto-update machines and maintain our own installer. I was
under the impression that the thing NetBSD-Athena-8.3 was blocking on
was update scripts and a new installer.
> having said that, packages would be great. as bill mentioned yesterday,
> the biggest issue is prob coming up w/ the source tarballs for each
> package. there's a big document on the netbsd website about all the
> ins-and-outs of creating a new package - that's a good place to start.
> presumably if these packages exist SIPB could make binary versions of
> them available for people, much like the layered linux-athena release.
As far as coming up with source tarballs goes, the 8.4 build system
has a method of generating SRPMs for Layered Athena (as well as binary
packages) and I expect that I could hack that a bit to do most/all of
the work of creating NetBSD packages.
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
