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.
