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Community Column: Proposal: Ports for GNU-Darwin

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I’m the founder of The GNU-Darwin Distribution.

sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-darwin/

In order to expedite the porting of free software to GNU-Darwin,
I have ported the FreeBSD package system and ports tree to Darwin.
I would like to deposit this source tree at SourceForge anonymous
CVS. We could deposit it with the GNU-Darwin project, or we could
create a new project for the Darwin ports tree as you like. Using
this system, I have created almost 2000 packages in two months.
Here is some information about the ports collection from
FreeBSD.

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html

The mininal gzipped source tarball for Darwin is 14megabytes,
which is equivalent to the ports.tar.gz from FreeBSD. This does not
include the Darwin specific changes to the individual ports.
Unpacked with all the Darwin changes in place, the source tree
requires over 10gigabytes. It can be expect to grow over the course
of time. Of course, the disk requirements at SourceForge are likely
to be much less if gzip is built into the CVS system.

I would like to commence a cvs vendor start before May 21st. In
addition, The GNU-Darwin project will be transitioning away from
porting and towards the refinement of the existing code base and
distribution.

Incidentally, I also have the FreeBSD ports system working on
the following operating systems; Linux, LinuxPPC, and OpenBSD. Some
additional work is required in the realm of fileio compatibility to
get the package system fully working for Linux systems, although I
have useful limited working versions now. GNU-Darwin intends to
exploit these advances towards user empowerment and freedom.

Regards,
Michael L. Love
MacCHESS
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/


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