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A comment on Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ‘90s.

Re:Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love le... by throw0101a on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @07:57AM (#28219985)
> […] it does borrow a couple of concepts from FreeBSD—its license (2-clause BSD), and a "ports tree" software management system similar to FreeBSD's.

If anyone wants a third-party software repository for their OS project, it's worth checking out NetBSD's pkgsrc:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkgsrc

It's multi-platform (Linux, BSD, macOS, Solaris, AIX, QNX, etc), and so has a lot of infrastructure for portability already set up:

* https://www.pkgsrc.org/#index4h1

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Re:Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love le... by rbanffy on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @09:37AM (#28220767)
> It's multi-platform (BSD, macOS,

I absolutely love MacPorts. It's packages done right.

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Re:Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love le... by plextoria on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @12:31PM (#28223591)
pkgsrc support is worked on by a dev: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/9268

I also gave a go at cross-compiling pkgsrc for SerenityOS. Will resume if I find some free time in the future.

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Re:Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love le... by boricj on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @01:12PM (#28224251)
I'm indeed working on it (meta-issue progress tracking is over there: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/issues/8605). However, bootstrapping pkgsrc is a stressful test of reliability, stability and POSIX-compliance for any operating system, let alone a hobbyist one. I've yet to have a pkgsrc bootstrap finish successfully without hitting a bug, deadlock, coredump, kernel panic or some combination thereof. It's like repeatedly stubbing one's toe on a sharp POSIX edge.

That's not counting actually building packages inside SerenityOS (pkgsrc doesn't support the kind of cross-compilation we'd need to build packages on a Linux host for a SerenityOS target), which will probably expose lots of other bugs, race conditions and limitations.

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