11 ms·

FreeBSD Can Now Be Built From Linux/macOS Hosts, Transition To Git Continues

200 points by URfejk 6y ago

josteink 6y ago
Much like WSL may be “eating” away at real Linux user-share, it will be interesting to see if enabling FreeBSD development outside FreeBSD itself will somehow affect the FreeBSD marketshare (for better or worse).
- ezoe 6y ago
  Those poor workers who has to use Windows for Linux-related works because of stupid employer's policy previously use VM, so it doesn't change much. Nothing to be eaten.
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    Nah, lots of shops begrudgingly support Linux laptops because a VM is a lot less practical, and the productivity hit would be substantial, probably, and forcing devs to make do with Windows only is bad for hiring. If WSL really works out, though, it might be the other way around – Linux on Windows might work really well, be able to do things Linux itself can't, like interfacing with Windows-only hardware, using DirectX, and be the superior experience in total for lots of people. It will be much, much harder to justify the expense of buying a whole different set of hardware and support it if the net result is a worse experience across the board. Businesses tend to not care much about freedom of software and the like.
    - zeveb 6y ago
      > Linux on Windows might work really well … and be the superior experience in total for lots of people. No, it will not and — without massive changes at Microsoft and in Windows — will never be. Source: have a Windows box, am repeatedly amazed at how bad it is. Seriously, it is embarrassing to use Windows. I think the only reason people enjoy it is the fact that they have not gotten a chance to really spend time in a good tiling window manager on X11/GNU/Linux. The GUI is ugly and laggy. The ads are an insult. The shells are either childish or stupidly (emphasis on the stupid) verbose, and gratuitously incompatible. There seriously is no comparison: in 2020, Linux is head and shoulders above Windows on the desktop.
      - corty 6y ago
        Most people who are happy with WoL are webdevs who do not really use anything beyond npm and git. So most people do not notice how bad things really are on Windows
      - trashburger 6y ago
        Why is this getting downvoted? He's right. Refute his points instead of downvoting him.
        jraph 6y ago
        > Why is this getting downvoted? He's right. Refute his points instead of downvoting him. >> I think the only reason people enjoy it is the fact that they have not gotten a chance to really spend time in a good tiling window manager on X11/GNU/Linux I don't like Windows, but its UI is not that bad, come on. Moreover, I use GNU/Linux full time but I don't use a tiling manager. My windows are fullscreen most of the time, and the rest of the time the features that allow putting windows on the corners or the sides (with the keyboard or the mouse) are more than enough. Tiling window managers are not for everyone. I didn't downvote but to me the message shows a lack of observation on how people use computers. The update manager that popups a notification or a dialog box or reboots in the middle of a presentation or a movie or something and, to add insult to injury, the system taking its time to apply the updates during the next startup? that could be embarrassing. Convenient UX features from the Linux world lacking on Windows are a thing (selection / middle click paste?), but Windows UI seems excellent. It's just less excellent than Plasma obviously, but it's nothing short of bad or embarrasing.
        2ion 6y ago
        > I don't like Windows, but its UI is not that bad, come on. I don't know. I am very OK with Win7 but I tried installing Win10 the other week on a VM in the intent to let it superseed my Linux on the desktop. The 125% scaling of UI made fonts blurry on my monitor and text inconsistently sized. The "dark" theme lets core apps like Explorer flicker in white then turn dark, like slow Android apps. There are mini ad programs in the start menu. I don't even know where you're supposed to configure settings anymore without search; the control panel vs fancy settings apps vs msc snapins (which are the only parts that still work reliably)? Their UI is worse than KDE or GNOME now. I had 3rd party applications working perfectly fine which I guess is the point but Windows10 UI is no marvel. This is a problem because Win7 used to just work, discretely. What's left is for me to experiment with group policy settings and suchlike (at least my edition permits it) in the hopes of getting my issues fixed. Probably have to throw in a ton of third-party "Windows 10 fix" powershell libraries to clean things up. I got the Win10 Enterprise license through my company. I would never pay money for this OS, privately.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      I think the year of Linux on the desktop will be heralded by Microsoft introducing WSL3 that provides absolute compatibility with all Linux applications. ;-) Not that most people would want to run most of those, but Microsofts corporate customers are fed up with supporting those Linux laptops and all the problems related to that.
      - whizzter 6y ago
        Really afaik the only thing missing from working well with mainline WSL2 now is some UI apps using GL,etc for X11 and iirc that is being worked so no need for any WSL3. Considering i've mostly used win envs to begin with this is already good enough that i see very few reasons to ever bother with installing Linux for myself again and even those are dwindling quickly.
        louwrentius 6y ago
        Interesting, thank you!
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      WSL2 is a VM...
      - unicornfinder 6y ago
        It is but it's an incredibly well integrated VM that's transparent to the user. I'm genuinely very, very happy developing on Windows with WSL2.
        the8472 6y ago
        Does it support hardware performance counters needed for profiling yet? Or GPU acceleration?
  - patrec 6y ago
    There is a non-zero chance WSL will make desktop Linux completely irrelevant even for developers.
    - znpy 6y ago
      it's called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
      - lproven 6y ago
        This. It's been MICROS~1's primary tactic against competitors for at least 1/3 of a century now and nothing has changed: now the company just _says_ it likes FOSS. Does Windows set up dual-boot if Linux is installed first? Naw. Does Windows read or write Linux filesystems? Naw. Has MS open-sourced any significant or important parts of Windows where it won't benefit directly? Naw. It is in MS' direct interests if PowerShell or .NET are supported on other platforms; it makes them more credible tools. Did we get source for Explorer or anything? Naw. Calculator. Big fat hairy deal. Has MS open-sourced any obsolete products that might actually be of use or interest, such as the final versions of MS-DOS (25 years old) or Windows 9x? Naw. They contain things like Explorer and so on that are still used. Can't go actually _helping_ people. It's all marketing flim-flam. Don't believe the hype. Linux is doing great on phones and servers and so on. On the desktop, only ChromeOS is not a rounding error. So, if MS can embrace-and-extend the Linux desktop, and make Win10 a better desktop Linux than Linux, then it helps MS and it helps Win10. And with what it learns from that, it can apply to WSL in the datacentre and on Azure, where it can make Windows Server a better Kubernetes than Kubernetes. Which, let's face it, would not be all that hard.
        whizzter 6y ago
        MS doesn't care about Stallmans GNU goals. What they do care about are developers not being annoyed with working on a Windows machine (or nowadays using their Azure clouds). Speaking for myself, I'm coming from the gamedev world (lately webdev) and as such was mostly tied to windows due to various tools(Photoshop,Modo,3dsmax in the past,etc) but that didn't mean that I was going to suffer by using IIS or spend a fortune on Windows server licences or higher hardware reqs for appplication servers for no good reason. So yes, MS will ignore OSS for their core Windows stuff, HOWEVER they will probably also play nice in the wider OSS (If not FOSS) community since they probably see Azure as the third leg of the future (apart from Windows and Office) and as such will ensure that everyone who uses it (be it for Windows or Linux deployments) are happy with it (And trashing things in the OSS community will thus be counterproductive).
- mekster 6y ago
  I gave up on FreeBSD on my hobby server after having have to maintain tiny differences all over for my ansible script and zshrc and whatnot. It just takes unnecessary effort to keep up with what just works for Linux and I didn't see much benefit sticking to FreeBSD.
  - Chilinot 6y ago
    This is a genuine issue. Dont understand the downvoters. I completely agree.
  - lmm 6y ago
    FreeBSD feels more solid to me; upgrades are easier, and stuff changes less often. I don't have time to keep up with maintaining a Linux server any more.
    - scaladev 6y ago
      What are you talking about? Put CentOS or Ubuntu LTS on your box and forget about it for the next ten years. The only updates you'll get are security and bug fixes, nothing fundamental will change. The next LTS release you'll install in 2030 will have substantial differences, but FreeBSD changes quite a bit too in such a large time span.
      - fullstop 6y ago
        A few things.. 1. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for five years -- Centos is for ten years. 2. FreeBSD updates are typically easy to perform, and the new system is not that different from the previous one. Things are where they used to be and you configure it the same way as you have for years. With Centos, there was a migration from yum -> dnf. With both Ubuntu and Centos the init system has changed from sysv -> upstart -> systemd. The default network configuration on Ubuntu has been replaced with netplan. I guess what I'm getting at is that there is significantly more churn in Linux distributions and vastly less churn in FreeBSD. This could also be seen as a lack of progress, but I don't think that OP sees it that way.
      - 6y ago
- pgt 6y ago
  Bootstrapping is as important as dogfooding. If you make it easy for people to try things, maybe they'll use it - maybe they'll change it. But if it crumbles in their hands, then it was never going to survive.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  I attempted to switch to a FreeBSD desktop, the first thing I noticed was that Redshift didn't work at all for changing colour temperature. It appears that they switched everything from X to Wayland, and that means Redshift stopped working, but no one appears to have noticed... That was a bad sign, so I uninstalled.
  - thimashmerkle 6y ago
    Wondering why you have been downvoted - freebsd is pretty useless these days. The mob appears to stifle feedback that goes against their fetish.
  - crest 6y ago
    Redshift works in i3 on my FreeBSD laptop (Intel GPU) and desktop (Nvidia GPU).
- rnd0 6y ago
  I'd be surprised if it does. If anything, it seems like this would make it more tempting to move from Linux to FreeBSD (maybe?). But this isn't FreeBSD development -at least not in the sense that you're creating FreeBSD apps in Linux. This is simply giving an alternative to downloading the isos. If you you need to verify that the source does what it says, now you can build it yourself on Linux. As someone who dearly wishes they could make NetBSD apps on Linux (edit: I mean build pkgsrc packages for NetBSD on Linux) I don't see it being that much of a game changer -though it is a nice feature on a couple of different levels (being able to build a system on bare metal instead of in a vm, and the code being so portable it can be built in a foreign environment)
jasoneckert 6y ago
"On the Git front, their transitioning from Subversion to Git they hope to have a beta repository by the end of October." Their migration from Subversion to Git also provided the motive for the murder mystery book "git commit murder" by Michael W. Lucas.
- aesyondu 6y ago
  At first I thought the title was too clickbaity. Then I saw the amazon reviews and now I'm curious and will add this to my read list. I'd like to know your thoughts if you've read it as well.
- Santosh83 6y ago
  Just read the blurb and interesting premise to say the least. Sounds like it could be great fun! I may get a copy. Thanks for the mention.
- erk__ 6y ago
  There also were a video about it with a genius intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj1Ricrq0bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj1Ricrq0bs
- thrownaway954 6y ago
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684331-git-commit-murder https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684331-git-commit-murd...
- ksec 6y ago
  I think LLVM and WebKit are moving to Git / Github as well.
  - bumblebritches5 6y ago
    LLVM has been exclusively on git for a year now.
- Erwin 6y ago
  From the same author, "Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter".
sarcastix 6y ago
It's great that we don't need FreeBSD to build FreeBSD anymore. In other news, my butcher has finally become a vegetarian. But, joking aside, it's great that FreeBSD has improved Linux KPI layer, improved Linux application compatibility, and has synced their ZFS code with upstream ZFS-on-Linux.
- jraph 6y ago
  > In other news, my butcher has finally become a vegetarian. That happened in Grenoble, France: The guy behind "La bouche'rit" ("The mouth laughs", a pun on "boucherie", the butchery), a vegan restaurant, was a previously a butcher.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I've heard of vegans / vegetarians running cattle farms as well.
    - speed_spread 6y ago
      Smart dealers don't use the product themselves.
- trasz 6y ago
  Note that all of those items are about making it easier to start using FreeBSD.
mrweasel 6y ago
Does anyone know which CI tools they wanted to use, that doesn't support FreeBSD? I mean there are many that doesn't, at least is so good that DARPA wanted to fund the project.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Worth noting that ESR has spent a huge amount of time on the perfect svn-to-git transition tool.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Years ago I used git-svn for this purpose. Didn't have any issues.
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    > ... some help pages on the web are still recommending git-svn as a conversion tool for migrating Subversion repositories to git. DO NOT DO THIS. You may damage your history badly if you do. -- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6778 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6778 (2015-05-28)
    - asveikau 6y ago
      ESR is a little grandiose. Note he doesn't give much detail, just say that it will bite you and you should listen to his assertions because he has done it more than anyone in the world.
      - db48x 6y ago
        You're not exactly wrong, but the test suite for Reposurgeon has a number of test cases derived from malformations caused by other tools, or made worse by other tools. The real problem here is that they were gathered over a decade, and nobody (myself included) really documented them very well. They all made sense when we committed them… Also, most conversion tools will handle the most common cases OK, and only generate garbage in oddball situations. They don't print out a warning when the oddball situations happen, so unless you go back and look at every commit you'll never notice the damage. Most of those situations only happen because of accidents, like creating a Subversion branch the wrong way, then deleting it and making it the correct way. Or adding files to a CVS repository by copying ,v files from a different CVS repository.
- 6y ago
qwerty456127 6y ago
I actually find it bizarre that it can be hard to build code for a particular platform on a different platform machine. Why does compiler logic have to depend on the machine it runs on?
- asveikau 6y ago
  I imagine it's mostly build system scripting. FreeBSD builds using makefiles, and the BSD make is not the same as GNU make, especially for the sometimes-complicated scripting they have to do inside of them. Adding cross-compilation to a complicated set of makefiles isn't impossible but can be some work. Beyond that there are other issues... eg. The ELF binaries generated need to declare themselves as FreeBSD binaries. A C compiler set up to produce Linux binaries won't do that. Maybe also they depend on a specific compiler (FreeBSD is using clang lately). When you build FreeBSD you also build a compiler so maybe this part isn't such a big deal.
  - bch 6y ago
    > I imagine it's mostly build system scripting. NetBSD has had this[0] for ~20 years (requiring only POSIX conformance from the build host). Think of it as a sort of first principle[1] in action. I wouldn’t be surprised if FreeBSD could achieve some success leaning on this work. [0] http://www.mewburn.net/luke/papers/build.sh.pdf http://www.mewburn.net/luke/papers/build.sh.pdf [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle
- Someone 6y ago
  One factor used to be that constant folding can be problematic. The target platform may have different-precision doubles, or have a different way to represent them (fairly unlikely, nowadays, but back in the time, if you wanted to cross-compile to x87, you needed the ability to compute with its 80-bit doubles. Another that the compiler may use platform tools (assembler, linker) to build binaries, and those tools they may need a library (say one for writing ELF binaries) that isn’t available. All of them can be ported, but that can be a lot of work for a limited number of users. Moreover, those users typically have (access to) the target hardware, as they have to be able to test the end result. So, a ‘normal’ compiler may not be optimal, but still be good enough for them. Because of that, you tend to see more cross-compilers the slower the target hardware.
dboreham 6y ago
Don't we say "build ON" rather than "build FROM"?? From would imply running ssh client on OS A to log into machine with OS B where you run 'make'.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  Remember that English isn't everyone's primary language. You obviously understood what they meant, as did the rest of us.
stonogo 6y ago
FreeBSD is a place of strange decisions. Recently, it was decided that any package containing a file in /usr/local/share/bash-completion/ should have a hard dependency on bash for installation. This has lead to almost every possible user-facing program depending on bash, to the degree that it's nearly impossible to use FreeBSD without also installing bash. I wonder if they're planning on switching the default /bin/sh in core.
eschaton 6y ago
This has been possible on NetBSD for quite a while, glad to see FreeBSD joining the party! Now we just need OpenBSD to support cross-builds… it takes a while to build even a kernel on my mvme88k system.
- danuker 6y ago
  All I can think of is "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
the_only_law 6y ago
Very nice, one of the things I'veike about NetBSzd was tge ease of building it from some other *nix box.

200 points by URfejk 6y ago

Much like WSL may be “eating” away at real Linux user-share, it will be interesting to see if enabling FreeBSD development outside FreeBSD itself will somehow affect the FreeBSD marketshare (for better or worse).

ezoe 6y ago
Those poor workers who has to use Windows for Linux-related works because of stupid employer's policy previously use VM, so it doesn't change much. Nothing to be eaten.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  Nah, lots of shops begrudgingly support Linux laptops because a VM is a lot less practical, and the productivity hit would be substantial, probably, and forcing devs to make do with Windows only is bad for hiring. If WSL really works out, though, it might be the other way around – Linux on Windows might work really well, be able to do things Linux itself can't, like interfacing with Windows-only hardware, using DirectX, and be the superior experience in total for lots of people. It will be much, much harder to justify the expense of buying a whole different set of hardware and support it if the net result is a worse experience across the board. Businesses tend to not care much about freedom of software and the like.
  - zeveb 6y ago
    > Linux on Windows might work really well … and be the superior experience in total for lots of people. No, it will not and — without massive changes at Microsoft and in Windows — will never be. Source: have a Windows box, am repeatedly amazed at how bad it is. Seriously, it is embarrassing to use Windows. I think the only reason people enjoy it is the fact that they have not gotten a chance to really spend time in a good tiling window manager on X11/GNU/Linux. The GUI is ugly and laggy. The ads are an insult. The shells are either childish or stupidly (emphasis on the stupid) verbose, and gratuitously incompatible. There seriously is no comparison: in 2020, Linux is head and shoulders above Windows on the desktop.
    - corty 6y ago
      Most people who are happy with WoL are webdevs who do not really use anything beyond npm and git. So most people do not notice how bad things really are on Windows
    - trashburger 6y ago
      Why is this getting downvoted? He's right. Refute his points instead of downvoting him.
      - jraph 6y ago
        > Why is this getting downvoted? He's right. Refute his points instead of downvoting him. >> I think the only reason people enjoy it is the fact that they have not gotten a chance to really spend time in a good tiling window manager on X11/GNU/Linux I don't like Windows, but its UI is not that bad, come on. Moreover, I use GNU/Linux full time but I don't use a tiling manager. My windows are fullscreen most of the time, and the rest of the time the features that allow putting windows on the corners or the sides (with the keyboard or the mouse) are more than enough. Tiling window managers are not for everyone. I didn't downvote but to me the message shows a lack of observation on how people use computers. The update manager that popups a notification or a dialog box or reboots in the middle of a presentation or a movie or something and, to add insult to injury, the system taking its time to apply the updates during the next startup? that could be embarrassing. Convenient UX features from the Linux world lacking on Windows are a thing (selection / middle click paste?), but Windows UI seems excellent. It's just less excellent than Plasma obviously, but it's nothing short of bad or embarrasing.
        2ion 6y ago
        > I don't like Windows, but its UI is not that bad, come on. I don't know. I am very OK with Win7 but I tried installing Win10 the other week on a VM in the intent to let it superseed my Linux on the desktop. The 125% scaling of UI made fonts blurry on my monitor and text inconsistently sized. The "dark" theme lets core apps like Explorer flicker in white then turn dark, like slow Android apps. There are mini ad programs in the start menu. I don't even know where you're supposed to configure settings anymore without search; the control panel vs fancy settings apps vs msc snapins (which are the only parts that still work reliably)? Their UI is worse than KDE or GNOME now. I had 3rd party applications working perfectly fine which I guess is the point but Windows10 UI is no marvel. This is a problem because Win7 used to just work, discretely. What's left is for me to experiment with group policy settings and suchlike (at least my edition permits it) in the hopes of getting my issues fixed. Probably have to throw in a ton of third-party "Windows 10 fix" powershell libraries to clean things up. I got the Win10 Enterprise license through my company. I would never pay money for this OS, privately.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    I think the year of Linux on the desktop will be heralded by Microsoft introducing WSL3 that provides absolute compatibility with all Linux applications. ;-) Not that most people would want to run most of those, but Microsofts corporate customers are fed up with supporting those Linux laptops and all the problems related to that.
    - whizzter 6y ago
      Really afaik the only thing missing from working well with mainline WSL2 now is some UI apps using GL,etc for X11 and iirc that is being worked so no need for any WSL3. Considering i've mostly used win envs to begin with this is already good enough that i see very few reasons to ever bother with installing Linux for myself again and even those are dwindling quickly.
      - louwrentius 6y ago
        Interesting, thank you!
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    WSL2 is a VM...
    - unicornfinder 6y ago
      It is but it's an incredibly well integrated VM that's transparent to the user. I'm genuinely very, very happy developing on Windows with WSL2.
      - the8472 6y ago
        Does it support hardware performance counters needed for profiling yet? Or GPU acceleration?
- patrec 6y ago
  There is a non-zero chance WSL will make desktop Linux completely irrelevant even for developers.
  - znpy 6y ago
    it's called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
    - lproven 6y ago
      This. It's been MICROS~1's primary tactic against competitors for at least 1/3 of a century now and nothing has changed: now the company just _says_ it likes FOSS. Does Windows set up dual-boot if Linux is installed first? Naw. Does Windows read or write Linux filesystems? Naw. Has MS open-sourced any significant or important parts of Windows where it won't benefit directly? Naw. It is in MS' direct interests if PowerShell or .NET are supported on other platforms; it makes them more credible tools. Did we get source for Explorer or anything? Naw. Calculator. Big fat hairy deal. Has MS open-sourced any obsolete products that might actually be of use or interest, such as the final versions of MS-DOS (25 years old) or Windows 9x? Naw. They contain things like Explorer and so on that are still used. Can't go actually _helping_ people. It's all marketing flim-flam. Don't believe the hype. Linux is doing great on phones and servers and so on. On the desktop, only ChromeOS is not a rounding error. So, if MS can embrace-and-extend the Linux desktop, and make Win10 a better desktop Linux than Linux, then it helps MS and it helps Win10. And with what it learns from that, it can apply to WSL in the datacentre and on Azure, where it can make Windows Server a better Kubernetes than Kubernetes. Which, let's face it, would not be all that hard.
      - whizzter 6y ago
        MS doesn't care about Stallmans GNU goals. What they do care about are developers not being annoyed with working on a Windows machine (or nowadays using their Azure clouds). Speaking for myself, I'm coming from the gamedev world (lately webdev) and as such was mostly tied to windows due to various tools(Photoshop,Modo,3dsmax in the past,etc) but that didn't mean that I was going to suffer by using IIS or spend a fortune on Windows server licences or higher hardware reqs for appplication servers for no good reason. So yes, MS will ignore OSS for their core Windows stuff, HOWEVER they will probably also play nice in the wider OSS (If not FOSS) community since they probably see Azure as the third leg of the future (apart from Windows and Office) and as such will ensure that everyone who uses it (be it for Windows or Linux deployments) are happy with it (And trashing things in the OSS community will thus be counterproductive).
mekster 6y ago
I gave up on FreeBSD on my hobby server after having have to maintain tiny differences all over for my ansible script and zshrc and whatnot. It just takes unnecessary effort to keep up with what just works for Linux and I didn't see much benefit sticking to FreeBSD.
- Chilinot 6y ago
  This is a genuine issue. Dont understand the downvoters. I completely agree.
- lmm 6y ago
  FreeBSD feels more solid to me; upgrades are easier, and stuff changes less often. I don't have time to keep up with maintaining a Linux server any more.
  - scaladev 6y ago
    What are you talking about? Put CentOS or Ubuntu LTS on your box and forget about it for the next ten years. The only updates you'll get are security and bug fixes, nothing fundamental will change. The next LTS release you'll install in 2030 will have substantial differences, but FreeBSD changes quite a bit too in such a large time span.
    - fullstop 6y ago
      A few things.. 1. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for five years -- Centos is for ten years. 2. FreeBSD updates are typically easy to perform, and the new system is not that different from the previous one. Things are where they used to be and you configure it the same way as you have for years. With Centos, there was a migration from yum -> dnf. With both Ubuntu and Centos the init system has changed from sysv -> upstart -> systemd. The default network configuration on Ubuntu has been replaced with netplan. I guess what I'm getting at is that there is significantly more churn in Linux distributions and vastly less churn in FreeBSD. This could also be seen as a lack of progress, but I don't think that OP sees it that way.
    - 6y ago
pgt 6y ago
Bootstrapping is as important as dogfooding. If you make it easy for people to try things, maybe they'll use it - maybe they'll change it. But if it crumbles in their hands, then it was never going to survive.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
I attempted to switch to a FreeBSD desktop, the first thing I noticed was that Redshift didn't work at all for changing colour temperature. It appears that they switched everything from X to Wayland, and that means Redshift stopped working, but no one appears to have noticed... That was a bad sign, so I uninstalled.
- thimashmerkle 6y ago
  Wondering why you have been downvoted - freebsd is pretty useless these days. The mob appears to stifle feedback that goes against their fetish.
- crest 6y ago
  Redshift works in i3 on my FreeBSD laptop (Intel GPU) and desktop (Nvidia GPU).
rnd0 6y ago
I'd be surprised if it does. If anything, it seems like this would make it more tempting to move from Linux to FreeBSD (maybe?). But this isn't FreeBSD development -at least not in the sense that you're creating FreeBSD apps in Linux. This is simply giving an alternative to downloading the isos. If you you need to verify that the source does what it says, now you can build it yourself on Linux. As someone who dearly wishes they could make NetBSD apps on Linux (edit: I mean build pkgsrc packages for NetBSD on Linux) I don't see it being that much of a game changer -though it is a nice feature on a couple of different levels (being able to build a system on bare metal instead of in a vm, and the code being so portable it can be built in a foreign environment)

jasoneckert 6y ago

"On the Git front, their transitioning from Subversion to Git they hope to have a beta repository by the end of October." Their migration from Subversion to Git also provided the motive for the murder mystery book "git commit murder" by Michael W. Lucas.

aesyondu 6y ago
At first I thought the title was too clickbaity. Then I saw the amazon reviews and now I'm curious and will add this to my read list. I'd like to know your thoughts if you've read it as well.
Santosh83 6y ago
Just read the blurb and interesting premise to say the least. Sounds like it could be great fun! I may get a copy. Thanks for the mention.
erk__ 6y ago
There also were a video about it with a genius intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj1Ricrq0bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj1Ricrq0bs
thrownaway954 6y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684331-git-commit-murder https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684331-git-commit-murd...
ksec 6y ago
I think LLVM and WebKit are moving to Git / Github as well.
- bumblebritches5 6y ago
  LLVM has been exclusively on git for a year now.
Erwin 6y ago
From the same author, "Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter".

sarcastix 6y ago

It's great that we don't need FreeBSD to build FreeBSD anymore. In other news, my butcher has finally become a vegetarian. But, joking aside, it's great that FreeBSD has improved Linux KPI layer, improved Linux application compatibility, and has synced their ZFS code with upstream ZFS-on-Linux.

jraph 6y ago
> In other news, my butcher has finally become a vegetarian. That happened in Grenoble, France: The guy behind "La bouche'rit" ("The mouth laughs", a pun on "boucherie", the butchery), a vegan restaurant, was a previously a butcher.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I've heard of vegans / vegetarians running cattle farms as well.
  - speed_spread 6y ago
    Smart dealers don't use the product themselves.
trasz 6y ago
Note that all of those items are about making it easier to start using FreeBSD.

mrweasel 6y ago

Does anyone know which CI tools they wanted to use, that doesn't support FreeBSD? I mean there are many that doesn't, at least is so good that DARPA wanted to fund the project.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Worth noting that ESR has spent a huge amount of time on the perfect svn-to-git transition tool.

asveikau 6y ago
Years ago I used git-svn for this purpose. Didn't have any issues.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  > ... some help pages on the web are still recommending git-svn as a conversion tool for migrating Subversion repositories to git. DO NOT DO THIS. You may damage your history badly if you do. -- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6778 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6778 (2015-05-28)
  - asveikau 6y ago
    ESR is a little grandiose. Note he doesn't give much detail, just say that it will bite you and you should listen to his assertions because he has done it more than anyone in the world.
    - db48x 6y ago
      You're not exactly wrong, but the test suite for Reposurgeon has a number of test cases derived from malformations caused by other tools, or made worse by other tools. The real problem here is that they were gathered over a decade, and nobody (myself included) really documented them very well. They all made sense when we committed them… Also, most conversion tools will handle the most common cases OK, and only generate garbage in oddball situations. They don't print out a warning when the oddball situations happen, so unless you go back and look at every commit you'll never notice the damage. Most of those situations only happen because of accidents, like creating a Subversion branch the wrong way, then deleting it and making it the correct way. Or adding files to a CVS repository by copying ,v files from a different CVS repository.
6y ago

qwerty456127 6y ago

I actually find it bizarre that it can be hard to build code for a particular platform on a different platform machine. Why does compiler logic have to depend on the machine it runs on?

asveikau 6y ago
I imagine it's mostly build system scripting. FreeBSD builds using makefiles, and the BSD make is not the same as GNU make, especially for the sometimes-complicated scripting they have to do inside of them. Adding cross-compilation to a complicated set of makefiles isn't impossible but can be some work. Beyond that there are other issues... eg. The ELF binaries generated need to declare themselves as FreeBSD binaries. A C compiler set up to produce Linux binaries won't do that. Maybe also they depend on a specific compiler (FreeBSD is using clang lately). When you build FreeBSD you also build a compiler so maybe this part isn't such a big deal.
- bch 6y ago
  > I imagine it's mostly build system scripting. NetBSD has had this[0] for ~20 years (requiring only POSIX conformance from the build host). Think of it as a sort of first principle[1] in action. I wouldn’t be surprised if FreeBSD could achieve some success leaning on this work. [0] http://www.mewburn.net/luke/papers/build.sh.pdf http://www.mewburn.net/luke/papers/build.sh.pdf [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle
Someone 6y ago
One factor used to be that constant folding can be problematic. The target platform may have different-precision doubles, or have a different way to represent them (fairly unlikely, nowadays, but back in the time, if you wanted to cross-compile to x87, you needed the ability to compute with its 80-bit doubles. Another that the compiler may use platform tools (assembler, linker) to build binaries, and those tools they may need a library (say one for writing ELF binaries) that isn’t available. All of them can be ported, but that can be a lot of work for a limited number of users. Moreover, those users typically have (access to) the target hardware, as they have to be able to test the end result. So, a ‘normal’ compiler may not be optimal, but still be good enough for them. Because of that, you tend to see more cross-compilers the slower the target hardware.

dboreham 6y ago

Don't we say "build ON" rather than "build FROM"?? From would imply running ssh client on OS A to log into machine with OS B where you run 'make'.

jlgaddis 6y ago
Remember that English isn't everyone's primary language. You obviously understood what they meant, as did the rest of us.

stonogo 6y ago

FreeBSD is a place of strange decisions. Recently, it was decided that any package containing a file in /usr/local/share/bash-completion/ should have a hard dependency on bash for installation. This has lead to almost every possible user-facing program depending on bash, to the degree that it's nearly impossible to use FreeBSD without also installing bash. I wonder if they're planning on switching the default /bin/sh in core.

eschaton 6y ago

This has been possible on NetBSD for quite a while, glad to see FreeBSD joining the party! Now we just need OpenBSD to support cross-builds… it takes a while to build even a kernel on my mvme88k system.

danuker 6y ago
All I can think of is "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

the_only_law 6y ago

Very nice, one of the things I'veike about NetBSzd was tge ease of building it from some other *nix box.