yet another darwin effort - puredarwin
People that known me for a while know, that I’ve been fairly involved with the OpenDarwin project (which was shutdown a while ago). I’ve stopped hacking on darwin for various reasons. Two of the bigger ones were:
- lack of support from apple
- Darwin by itself has no use
The first one does not need any further explanation.
Darwin is nice to play around for educational reasons, but for day-to-day use, nobody will use it. Whoever would use Darwin, might as well use Mac OS X. And as an open-source operating system Darwin does not make much sense either, since too many components of it have licensing issues, if you try to redistribute it. Despite the obnoxious GNU-Darwin project, there is now a new project trying to come to life: puredarwin.
Apparently these people are not even aware of the fact, that Darwin is everything but selfhosting (various parts of the source are so-called XCode Projects and as such need to be build on Mac OS X, there is no counter-part for that available for Darwin):
From a conversation on their irc-channel (#puredarwin on freenode network)
22:32 < vmlemon> Can we compile this stuff on Darwin itself?
23:00 < probono> vmlemon: not tried yet
23:01 < vmlemon> OK
00:22 < kvv> vmlemon: cannot compile Xcode projects on Darwin
00:32 < vmlemon> Back to the start of the perpetual problem cycle :(
00:32 < vmlemon> We really could do with an “OXCode” (Open XCode)
00:33 < vmlemon> Well, it’s not the best name, but you’ve got the idea
00:36 < vmlemon> A Free Software, XCode compatible environment on which the tricky XCode only components can be built
Well, we will see the outcome of this. ;)
I seriously doubt that Darwin will ever become a serious player in the BSD family. Too many constraints and too many nice-to-hack-on alternatives.
Maybe if they replaced those *.xcode and *.pbproj files with Makefiles they could get a bit closer. I seem to recall a program that would translate *.xcode projects into Makfile format but I can’t find any reference to it.
OpenDarwin fell apart after you left, Felix. Oh well…
I seem to remember from my dealings with Apple that XCode’s predecessor ProjectBuilder relied heavily on jam.
Needless to say, from hanging out on the mailing lists for a few years I noticed the main reason most people were keen to try Darwin was because they figured they were getting MacOSX for free and were generally dissapointed to discover they had to use X11.
For me Darwin promised to be a way to improve MacOSX from outside of Apple, but Apple made it increasingly difficult to the point where it was impossible.
Speaking of which I almost had a complete Darwin build at one point with stack smash protection, but when the OpenDarwin project died and Apple continued to close up the source following the illicit copies of the MacOSX x86 that had been circulating, it seemed pointless to continue work.
It’s nice to see comments from both of you :)
Regarding the idea of improving Darwin/Mac OS X outside of apple it has been proven over the years that it simply does not seem to work out. The amount of improvements going back from OpenDarwin cvs into apple can be counted on both hands max. ;)