Brent Fulgham wrote: > However a BSD kernel with the GNU user-space would probably be > more palatable.
I'm finally going to pipe up here, from the (mostly) end-user perspective. I, personally, want the GNU userland. I've used BSD, and GNU (and Sun, and HP-UX, and Irix, and Ultrix, and ...) - and I want GNU because I find it far easier from a user-interface perspective, and often from a base functionality perspective. I want to be able to use a kernel that has, in my eyes, more stability and maturity in some specific areas, and for that I'd need something derived from BSD 4.4. I have no idea which libc would mesh the two together more sanely. But I think that the notion of "Debian folks working on openpackages", while perfectly reasonable, would not be a Debian port (in the sense of "Debian GNU/BSD"), and thus, this probbly isn't the right place to do it. I could, of course, be misunderstanding the purpose of the Debian ports lists. And I certainly have no objection to BSDs getting a reasonable package format natively. :) As an aside, there is exactly one reason that I use Debian GNU/Linux, at the moment. That reason is called "dpkg". I frequently have to maintain a reasonably large number of computers for other people on minimal/spare time, and the ability to do package upgrades and rollouts without needing much, if any, human interaction - and still trust that things won't blow up - is the single most important feature of Debian, to me. The social contract is nice; I approve of it. But it wouldn't even be close to enough to convert me, if some other distribution had dpkg, and Debian didn't. Just my perspective on things. -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lightbearer.com/~lucifer
