Apparently, though unproven, at 20:15 on Tuesday 07 September 2010, Al did opine thusly:
> > So it really does come down to portage after all. Portage has a hard > > dependency on bash. portage is intimately wrapped up in the linux way of > > doing things. > > Right, we have to say Bash. To be exact Bash is GNU not Linux. I > genarally say Linux not Gnu-Linux. However in this case the difference > matters. > > http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/ I fail to see how this is relevant. Portage requires bash, not sh. It is utterly irrelevant what the licensing and political implications are for bash, the technical fact is that portage *requires* Chet's app. To be fair to portage, it's not portage itself that requires it, it's the ebuilds. But ebuilds are the dedicated input format to portage and the two are inextricably linked. > I run portage more or less sucessfully on Cygwins POSIX layer. Other > people run it on Interix or Solaris. > > > As evidence: the only non-linux port that went anywhere was on FreeBSD, > > now moribund for years. > > True. But FreeBSD isn't that popular like Windows, Mac or Linux. So you don't work at a Tier 1 ISP then? FreeBSD rules that space. I get hugely better performance out of Postfix on FreeBSD than on Linux - all other ISPs in this country concur. > I think there is a future for second level managers that can be > installed into multiple OS and yet set up the very same POSIX > invironement. Having that you can build complex software that is > portable. You don't depend on Java. You don't need to run a virtual > server. > > Currently there are two canditates. One candidate is Cygwin Ports, the > other one is Gentoo Prefix. Cygwin Ports just added cross-compilation > features into the latest edition. Still Cygwin is limited to Windows. > By this Cygwin Ports has done the first steps to become portable to > Linux and Mac in future and it is already very mature on Windows. > > Gentoo Prefix is already able to run on Windows-Interix, Linux and Mac > as second level manager, but it isn't that mature. Still it is not > discovered by a bigger community. The potential is already there. The benefits of a source-based distro are many and have been covered extensively elsewhere. gentoo.org lists most of them in a accurate fashion. I never said porting portage could not be done, I said it would be hard work. > > So you finally can't say FreeBSD was the only port of Portage. But > there is none that went to a major public. I don't see the point of portage on FreeBSD frankly, considering the general use-case where FreeBSD shines. ports is more than adequate for that and I don't need the maintenance overhead of portage on machines requiring weekly updates. I don't build embedded systems or need highly customized OSes. In fact, portage is complete overkill and I refuse to allow it to be deployed at work. Check my posting history for the rationale behind this. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
