2 Replies to “BSDNews pile”

1. The article on the Linuxulator reminds me of a horrible thought that’s recurred this week — how insane (and how much of a bikeshed) would it be to design one ‘standardized’ BSD ABI?* This wouldn’t have to be a primary thing, more like one more target for pkgsrc and its brethren, but it’d make “BSD on the desktop” a mildly saner prospect.

   I’m imagining something that only versions itself every 5+ years, so you could build a distribution around ‘universal’ packages, choose your kernel, then worry about native builds for packages where system-specific features really matter. Seems like the common subset of features is growing, but each distro is still maintaining COMPAT_… code for each other at its leisure, and Linux remains the lingua franca because at least there’s only one (thousand) version(s) of it.

2. *’ABI’ used here because binary compatibility is what matters.

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