Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 20:06:12 +0100
From: Andreas Schuldei <andreas@schuldei.org>
Subject: assimilating OpenBSD
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

Last friday I started Debian OpenBSD with the following targets
and milestones:

I aim for a secure OS, that is highliy modular and maintainable.
For that reason I decided to use OpenBSD kernel and userspace.
I expect the security of debian GnuLinux to raise dramatically
once the code audit and bugfixing started and gained some
momentum, but the code quality (and with that the security) of
OpenBSD will be superior for some time.

These are the milestones:

1. port the Debian package tools to OpenBSD
2. package the OpenBSD CVS. not ports.
   (find some way to do the package generation half automatic for
   now to get some base, make source update from their CVS tree easy.
   Do NOT fiddle with paths, bootprocess, FHS and package
   configuration yet). Introduce dependencys. THis will be a
   Openbsd system coming in packages.
3. configure the packages in a way, that installed daemons really
   are configured in a meaningfull way and activ.
4. switch to systemV bootprocess, with starting and stopping of
   services with /etc/init.d/apache restart.
5. modify packages to conform to FHS.
6. have a debian openbsd boot disk 
7. try and port debian applications (like kde and friends) to
   debian OpenBSD.

Right now I am working on dpkg and debhelper. they partly reley
on powerful gnu-features of unix tools like xargs -r, 
tar --no-recurse --null, find -regex, cpio -0
but that is basicly it. these are partly embedded in C, partly in
perl. I do not speak perl and I would have problems emulating
stuff like xargs -r in that language. If people can help and make
the things work smoothly, that would be great.



I put the existing tarballs and diffs of debhelper and dpkg up on
the web at http://pandora.debian.org/~andreas/obds/. Please look
at the diffs. You will notice that some fixes are just
preliminary avoiding the problem and a better solution is needed. 
gnu-make (gmake) is necessary to build the packages.

Please note, that current OpenBSDs tar is broken and tar -T
list_of files does not work. A patch is here:
http://cvs.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/wwwgnats.pl/full?pr=1664 

I hope to not be flamed and not be discussed to death.

Andreas


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