On Mon, 18 Jul 2011 at 12:34:52 +0200, Federico Di Gregorio wrote: > Wasn't "universal" as in "runs everywhere" (i.e., on a lot of archs) vs > as "runs everything" (when a Debian GNU/WinNT?).
I've always understood "the universal OS" to mean "all-purpose" and/or "for everyone". There's currently no CPU architecture suitable for all purposes for which an OS is needed (I wouldn't want an x86 in my phone, or any current ARM CPU in my laptop), so portability between CPU architectures is necessary in order to be universal, but I think that's an implementation detail rather than a goal. Is Linux suitable for all purposes for which an OS is needed? I think that's an open question. I'm not at all convinced that the ability to use kFreeBSD or Hurd makes Debian any more universal (in terms of people who can use it, or things you can use it for) than it already was, but the people working on those ports clearly think there's some benefit in supporting them. The point at which kFreeBSD or Hurd might harm Debian's universality is the point at which supporting them causes problems for the rest of the project. Are they a net benefit or a net burden to the rest of the project? I don't claim to have the answer, but I think that's the question to be asking. systemd is far from the only project whose maintainer considers supporting non-Linux to be a waste of effort. Lennart does have a good point that writing "portably" requires you to refrain from using features that were added to Linux specifically to make what you're doing easier, more efficient or both, which seems perverse at best. Perhaps the solution to systemd portability is to give the FreeBSD kernel more of the useful features that originated in Linux? Indeed, you could view portability to many kernels as an instance of the platform problem <http://lwn.net/Articles/443531/>: presumably, the only reason you'd want to target kFreeBSD is that it does something better than Linux does, but perhaps the right solution to that is to make Linux better. S -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110718115410.ga31...@reptile.pseudorandom.co.uk
