Re: Annoucning DragonFly BSD!

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:>
:>     I stupidly misspelled 'announcing' in the subject line,
:
:Well, at least you didn't misspell your name...  :-)
:
:>     but it's very real.  Check the site out:
:>
:>	http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
:
:The site looks interesting.  All the kernel-level stuff is
:pretty much over my head, but I will be interested in the
:package-level ideas (once work starts on that part).
:
:-- 
:Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    I have the beginnings of an idea for how to do the packaging
    stuff properly... and how to automated it so one gets the 
    dependancies correct.  To realize the idea I will have to get
    to the point where a VFS layer can run in userland.  Then it
    becomes trivial to build 'filtering VFS layers' that run in
    userland (i.e. don't take up kernel resources) which can be used
    to figure out *exactly* what a package references in the system
    and *exactly* what it effects.  Once one is able to do that
    the dependancy and conflict information can not only be 
    completely automated, but one can theoretically (and automatically)
    create 'environments' for each package to run in which resolve the
    conflicts (i.e.  makes sure that the exact version of third party
    shared libraries and so forth used by a package are the ones that
    package sees even if multiple versions would normally install over
    each other).

    I'm guessing 6 months until the project gets to that point, oweing
    to the complexity of fixing VFS and, in particular, VFS_LOOKUP.
    But then, watch out!  Infinite application... not only to the
    packaging system, but to the concept of how jails should work as well,
    and many other things.

						-Matt