Re: It's not Rust, it's FreeBSD (and LLVM)

Hi,

On Tue, 3 Sep 2024, at 16:32, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> A FreeBSD system with no installed ports is a rarity today.

I have 3 such systems. There may be more people running plain systems than you think.
There's no way to tell. Although i concede most systems will have ports installed.

> But a FreeBSD system recompiling itself from source is even rarer.

? really? All my -stable and -current machines are recompiled from source.
Is this really that rare?

> We need to find a contemporary and useful answer to "What is FreeBSD?"

I've always thought of it as "freebsd is an OS". [1]
I couldn't care less if the compiler comes from somewhere else ultimately,
as long as it works and has a BSD or similar permissive licence.
Everything ultimately in some shape or another comes from somewhere.
If it's in src/ then it's FreeBSD IMO.

> The only answer I can think of
> ------------------------------
> "FreeBSD is ports (some of those ports contain the kernel and userland)"

Oh I hope not... ports can sometimes be a nightmare.
The separation of OS and ports is a great thing to have and is
a freebsd 'selling point' IMO.
One can easily deinstall all ports and blat /usr/local/* then
reinstall, in order to recover a damaged system, for example.

> As part of the migration, we yank LLVM out of the src.
>
> LLVM does not belong in src by any sane criteria, and any microscopic
> benefits of "tight integration" can be delivered with a "toolchain-llvm"
> (meta-)port.
> And yes, we have ports written in Rust, why do you ask? 

I don't think the benefits of tight integration are microscopic,
at least not to me. I'd rather have kernel modules in src than in ports,
including the video and wifi stuff. ports get out of sync and breakage happens.
This seems less of an issue for src.

At present, we have to install pkg to even get a tool for downloading sources.
FreeBSD as OS is in that sense incomplete (again IMO). 
Why isn't got or git@tiny in base. We used to have svnlite.

[1] If freebsd goes entirely to pkgbase, would it then really be an OS or 
just a distro? (eg 'linux is a kernel')

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