Talk:GNU variants

message: From Wikipedia:Merge: Wikipedia is not a dictionary; there doesn't need to be a separate entry for every concept in the universe ... If an article is very short and cannot or should not be expanded terribly much, it often makes sense to merge it with an article on a broader topic.
I don't think this article is going to become large any time soon.  It will probably never grow large, but if that does happen, I'm certain enough that it will not be in the near future.  There is a page about a similar topic: GNU/FreeBSD, and that page isn't much bigger than this one.  I would like to suggest merging these two articles, but to what name?  The unified article should remain open ended so that if a GNU system with the OpenBSD kernel comes into existance, it will also fit on the unified page.  "GNU Operating Systems with BSD kernels"?  "GNU Operating System variants" or "GNU Operating Systems with alternative kernels" and then in the opening line say "for linux-based variants, see GNU/Linux? Suggestions very welcome. Gronky 15:01, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Normal GNU (with the Hurd) and GNU/Linux are very common and deserver their own page. Let's just make this an article about any minor GNU/$kernel. These would be GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/kNetBSD and maybe GNU/OpenSolaris aswell, though that one might be large enough to justify its own article. (Nexenta is quite active, from what I understand, but I'm not sure about that.) Geronimooo 15:40, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: So I made this merge -- mms 13:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What do you have to support your assertion that GNU with the hurd is common? debian popcon reports just 11 systems using hurd compared to nearly 100 using kfreebsd and over 100K using linux. Further kfreebsd has actually made it into a debian stable release (and is on-target for continued inclusion) while hurd is looking like it's going to get kicked out of the official archive (having never made it into a stable release) unless the porters SERIOUSLY pick up their game in the near future. Granted debian isn't the only hurd distro but even so things look far more rosy for kfrebsd than for hurd to me. Plugwash (talk) 15:56, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

text: Sorry didn't spot how old these posts were, Kfreebsd was less common back then. Still I haven't seen any evidence that hurd was EVER common. Plugwash (talk) 15:57, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge 

message: »This makes it far simpler for hardware manufacturers to develop device drivers for it while protecting their IP rights.«
This statment is a bit unbalanced. It presents binary drivers as an unalloyed benefit, and offers a surious justification: hardware manufacturers don't want binary drivers because there're easier to write, it's purely to avoid releasing code. Could there be a link to, say binary-only driver, to present some of the disadvantages of binary drivers. 203.214.125.30 09:50, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed it to »This makes it legal for hardware manufacturers to release device drivers without the source.« -- mms 13:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Binary drivers 

message: Ging redirects here. This is useless until someone can add what "Ging" actually means to the article. (And no, "ging is not ging" is not enough on its own!) 86.136.255.69 (talk) 21:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Can you add something to this article to say what Ging is?  If not, I hope someone else will - but if you know something, please help. --Gronky (talk) 09:16, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  A Debian/kFreeBSD LiveCD, apparently: http://glibc-bsd.alioth.debian.org/ging/ EdC (talk) 00:09, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Next time you need info on Linux etc., try  --Thinboy00's sockpuppet alternate account 19:30, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ging? 

message: I believe this is currently bootstrapping itself in the main archive. This would mean it can release with Squeeze.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/04/msg00001.html
Not an official release yet, but almost there. kgoetz (talk) 07:31, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Debian GNU/kFreebsd 

message: * Gentoo/Alt is a project to provide an operating system based on a GNU userland managed by Portage to with different kernels including FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD.
This section is incorrect. Gentoo/FreeBSD (not sure about the rest of Gentoo/Alt) uses the FreeBSD user-land. See The official page. It does use the GNU tool-chain, though.
--Theriddle (talk) 00:36, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gentoo/Alt 

message: The section "FreeBSD variants" is followed by a link to the full article "Debian GNU/NetBSD." However this link leads right back to this article so I have deleted it. 86.41.80.64 (talk) 10:35, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Redundant "main article" link 

message: Hi,
Just wondering if there is a standard or active development on wikipedia? What does the project have to show to be active?
kgoetz (talk) 22:30, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: As expected, there can't be a clear-cut definition of "active development", and I don't think there is any policy/guideline on wikipedia, however, here is my take: if there are a lot of people working on it a a relative short timeframe (1 week/month), making lots of improvements, than that could be a "metric". An even more specific metric could look into the number of commits/changes to source-code repositories available on the internet. If a project makes very frequent releases, it might also be an indication of active development (but not necessarily). Inversely, if a project has not shown any release or any type of development in, for example, the last year, it might be hard to "prove" "active development". In concrete cases, I think projects like Firefox, Fedora or Ubuntu clearly meet this definition. Regarding Debian GNU/Hurd and my edit, since the last version was from 2009 and I saw no evidence of active development (in fact, no evidence of any recent development at all), I felt it was incorrect to call it under active development with such a lack of information. However, after reading your comment, I found out the news page which at least seems to indicate the project is not dead. Anyway, if you are familiar with the project and think it is actively developed, feel free to revert my edit, that will not be a problem, but if you do that, I ask you to use wording like "As of June, 2011, this project in under active development", so this way information remains accurate in the future. --SF007 (talk) 23:22, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry about the delayed reply, I forgot i'd posted here. Hurd hasn't been released with Debian yet, but may be released as a technology preview with Wheezy. I feel it is under active development, as its development list receives regular posts with patches for/discussion of portability. I guess as its the low end of the 'active' spectrum (eg, active but not very active) i won't be too fussed with what happens wording wise. -- kgoetz (talk) 09:27, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Debian doesn't split out contributions by target architecture/OS so it's difficult to tell how much activity there is unless it happens to show up on a mailing list. Still the stats on buildd.debian.org paint a picture of sporadic imrovements though they also show that they are a long way from meeting the release critera Plugwash (talk) 16:07, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is active development? 

message: I'm not putting this in the article right now because it would have to be worded very carefully to avoid stepping on OR and/or SYNTH but the bottom line is that at this point it would take a miracle for hurd to released with debian wheezy. Their build percentages are still far from acceptable, they haven't been in dialog with the release team, they haven't been included in testing even as a "broken and fucked arch"*. 
* New architectures generally get added to testing as a "broken and fucked arch" (debian terminology not mine but it basically means they don't impact testing transitions for other architectures) and then later get switched to being a release architecture when their state in testing is considered good enough.
-- Plugwash (talk) 02:08, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I do share your expectation, especially because the Hurd developers are essentially 5-10 part timers. To even complete java implementation, their DDE driver project and maybe get only one simple GUI running without major bugs until the end of 2012 seems excessively ambitious to me (I wrote the factual part of this in the article, btw). However, the ambition is there. The developers publish snapshot dvd images every quarter year, they keep porting packages and they still work on the hurd. So even though probably almost everyone expects this to be just another instance of "almost critical mass" which the hurd seems to see every 5-6 years in its life cycle, this is not something that can be written into the article unless someone FOSS- or Debian-notable says it out loud. -- 178.25.83.219 (talk) 09:47, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  debian hurd 

message: The original system is GNU, which uses Hurd.  GNU/Linux is a variant because it's not exactly GNU.
GNU systems using Hurd are already documented in the GNU article.  Can I merge the "Hurd variants" sections from here to some part of the GNU article? Gronky (talk) 11:55, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hurd variants are not "variants" 

message: The current definition of GNU variant at the beginning of the article doesn't allow for a hypothetical combination of GNU Hurd and a non-GNU core userland to be considered a GNU variant. --isacdaavid 02:05, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I believe that combination would not be GNU, and easily found sources would back that up. The kernel (Hurd) was the "last" part of GNU. The compiler and C library one of the first. The C library would be a system library that would be "core userland", that is GNU. The compiler "application" software. comp.arch (talk) 13:57, 22 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Would a system comprising the Hurd kernel and a non-GNU userland not be a GNU variant? 

message: Should GNU-Darwin be listed in this article? I've never been too clear as to what exactly its status is, and what it "counts" as... Cooljeanius (talk) (contribs) 01:23, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  GNU-Darwin 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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