Fwd: Unified BSD?

[John Marino]

On 12/4/2012 16:42, Martin wrote:
> Don't get me wrong, i am not criticising pkgsrc or intentionally trying
> get people offside.
>
> So aside from the obvious differences and limitations (i.e. manpower,
> design of each BSD system) What is stopping per say DragonflyBSD or any
> other BSD from using packages from FreeBSD or vice versa through pkgsrc?
>
> Or is it simply that some choose not to provide back to pkgsrc?
>

Recent work by myself has proven that it is feasible for DragonFly to 
use FreeBSD ports collection with an specialized overlay.  So there's 
nothing technically stopping that from happening.

Pkgsrc has a goal to be universal, so theoretically all platforms will 
benefit from contributing because the committer is ideally conscious 
that multiple platforms use it while FreeBSD ports committers only 
concern themselves with making the port work on FreeBSD.

While pkgsrc supports FreeBSD and OpenBSD, in practice it seems most 
users of those systems tend to stick with FreeBSD Ports Collection and 
OpenBSD package system.  You can speculate why that is.  It takes a ton 
of work to keep a platform current on pkgsrc (which is why I used the 
words "theoretically" and "ideally") so somebody from those systems has 
to do that work, which means they have to consider that work worthwhile. 
  I don't see activity to that effect.

Pkgsrc would be happy to have parties from FreeBSD and OpenBSD improve 
the quality of the packages in the repository, I am quite sure of that. 
  Somebody just needs to donate that energy.

John