*BSD News Article 18886


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From: osyjm@cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: What's "FreeBSD"?
Date: 26 Jul 1993 17:17:19 GMT
Organization: Computer Science, MSU, Bozeman MT, 59717
Lines: 32
Message-ID: <2313iv$aai@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <22up8o$pvb@introl.introl.com> <22ut4j$53o@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <explorer.743637064@tbird.cc.iastate.edu> <230f4u$jri@bright.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: fubar.cs.montana.edu

According to Bob Kemp <rsk@ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
>
>In <explorer.743637064@tbird.cc.iastate.edu> explorer@iastate.edu (Michael Graff) writes:
>
>>One thing Linux has going for it is there is ONE big push, but three medium
>>sized ones.
>
>The main thing seems to be that the NetBSD & FreeBSD groups are
>talking to each other & on fairly friendly terms.  (IMHO) When
>NetBSD broke away it was rather worrying, but they seem to be doing
>really good work.  On first reading of the FreeBSD "announcement",
>it was also worrying but they say that they will take things from
>NetBSD.  Presumably bug fixes will be freely shared and binary
>compatibility will be improved (even if requires support for multiple
>executable formats).

This is an accurate assessment.  Chris from NetBSD tosses in tidbits
about things in the kernel that they've fixed in NetBSD, that
then propogate to the FreeBSD tree.  People from NetBSD and FreeBSD belong
to each others mailing lists, so each side knows what the other side is doing.

In the case of FreeBSD, I think the general consensus is to let NetBSD be
the bleeding edge hack and slash tree, and FreeBSD lag behind a bit, and
try to keep things stable.

As to multiple a.out formats, I'm not sure what the status of that stuff
is in FreeBSD, but eventually after all the kinks are worked out in NetBSD,
it will wend its way over to FreeBSD most likely.
-- 
 Jaye Mathisen, COE Systems Manager                (406) 994-4780
 410 Roberts Hall,Dept. of Computer Science
 Montana State University,Bozeman MT 59717	osyjm@cs.montana.edu