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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Interview with Jordan Hubbard About DarwinPorts 258

Posted by pudge from the here-a-port-there-a-port-everywhere-a-port-port dept.
Gentu writes "OSNews hosts an interview with Jordan Hubbard (of Apple, OpenDarwin, and FreeBSD fame) where they discuss DarwinPorts and how they compare to Fink. There is also a hint from Jordan that there might be some of the FreeBSD 5.x advancements to be found in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) that is coming out, reportedly, this autumn."
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Interview with Jordan Hubbard About DarwinPorts More

Interview with Jordan Hubbard About DarwinPorts

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  • Bummer. (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @09:56AM (#5743823) Homepage Journal

    The interviewer didn't ask for Hubbard's reasoning for leaving a dying free OS to join a dying company.

    yes I'm joking
    • Dying+dying = Living!! =)
      • I don't agree, hp and compaq tried that one and end up with, big company with problems + big company with problems = very big company with lots of problems.

        James

    • Re:Bummer. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dub Kat ( 183404 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:24AM (#5743997)
      Hubbard has said he joined Apple because they achieved the "holy grail", a easy-to-use UNIX-based desktop where he could hack and also play RtCW. He wanted to help so he went to Apple, while FreeBSD and Linux still aren't there yet.

      This has been my own experience. After trying hard to use FreeBSD and Linux for a few years as my primary desktop, I just got frustrated. It wasn't worth my time, so I switched to OS X. And coincidentally enough, I also happen to work for Apple now.

      • Re:Bummer. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:27AM (#5744017)
        I also happen to work for Apple now.

        Finally, an unbiased opinion.

      • Re:Bummer. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by NicolaiBSD ( 460297 ) <`spam' `at' `vandersmagt.nl'> on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @11:18AM (#5744329) Homepage
        Hubbard has said he joined Apple because they achieved the "holy grail", a easy-to-use UNIX-based desktop where he could hack and also play RtCW. He wanted to help so he went to Apple, while FreeBSD and Linux still aren't there yet.

        I can hack away all I like on my Linux boxen, play native RTCW when I'm done, and I'd say Jordan can manage to handle either Gnome or KDE.

        What was your point again?

      • Re:Bummer. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by c13v3rm0nk3y ( 189767 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @01:54PM (#5745508) Homepage
        After trying hard to use FreeBSD and Linux for a few years as my primary desktop, I just got frustrated.

        I hear you. This was my primary decision for springing for a new G4 last year, instead of building my usual "god box" to run some free *NIX on. I have no reason to run Windows at home, so there was no "switch" involved.

        I'll admit I got a little tired of hacking and tweaking to get the CD burner to work, the 3D card to work, the sound card to work... Sure, I got things to work (mostly, or until the next kernel update) and I still consider it fun to tweak a Linux box. But it's less fun the older I get.

  • I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)

    by levik ( 52444 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @09:59AM (#5743850) Homepage
    ... if they asked him when that pesky and confusing second mouse button code will be discarded? The pile of bloatware that it is...

  • Mac OSX vs Linux (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    as someone who uses computers for both research and creative purposes and at the same time need compatability with the masses (i.e. M$office compatability) I have finally made the decision to switch from my current dual boot windoze/linux config to mac. I can now run all the professional level music production software I need for work, my free linux apps, research group unix software and M$office on one system without the need for reboots / emulators etc...
    I had been trying linux/openoffice/wine for some t

    • Re:Mac OSX vs Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

      by byolinux ( 535260 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:35AM (#5744057) Journal
      I'm very much the same...

      I started off on an Amstrad CPC, which finally gave up in 1997, when it got smashed by a stupid relative. I then moved to a PC and dual booted between RH5/6/7/8 and Win 95/98/NT/2000 before finally getting pissed off with things never quite working right... saved up, bought a Mac, and now I'm the most sorted computer user I know...

      I can do everything I want, and not worry about people doing things their own way, cause I can finally handle it all.. well, apart from Office documents, as I refuse to buy it... but OpenOffice/Aqua will be my friend there.

  • i386 Ports of OS X (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ballresin ( 398599 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:30AM (#5744024) Homepage Journal
    You guys obviously didn't hear about the seeded developer testing of a "White box" from Apple. The case was welded shut to avoid intrusion, and reportedly contained an Athalon chipset. OS X IS ported to i386 and IS working. I don't see why Apple holds back, but it sure is cool to know that they have an ace up their sleeve...

    "...these observers report that Apple has been serious enough about its ace in the hole to seed a few lucky civilians with prototype boxes - delivered heavily swaddled in layers of cloak-and-dagger security, natch. Specifically, recent testers report taking delivery of Athlon-powered boxes that Apple had assiduously welded shut to prevent prying eyes from ogling whatever other gremlins might be lurking inside these nondescript beige chassis." -MacEdition

    • Re:i386 Ports of OS X (Score:5, Funny)

      by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @11:14AM (#5744304) Homepage
      Now all they have to do is implement driver support for every piece of i386 hardware known to man, and it'll be ready to blow Windows out of the market.
      • Now all they have to do is implement driver support for every piece of i386 hardware known to man, and it'll be ready to blow Windows out of the market.

        Even microsoft doesnt support every piece of i386 hardware.

        And if OSX was ported to x86 hardware, it wouldnt be a 386 chip.
    • Here's the link to the MacEdition report this guy's talking about:

      http://www.macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20021112.php [macedition.com]

    • Re:i386 Ports of OS X (Score:5, Funny)

      by bsharitt ( 580506 ) <bridget AT sharitt DOT com> on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @11:20AM (#5744346) Journal
      I think NASA used these x86 macs to do the video editing when they faked the moon landings.

    • Re:i386 Ports of OS X (Score:3, Insightful)

      by stefanb ( 21140 )
      The parent is OT, and just sounds like a troll, but I'll bite:

      As I stated in another thread [slashdot.org], it doesn't make sense for Apple to switch architectures, unless IBM was refusing to give them the 970. And another rumor site's reports [envestco2.com] make that seem somewhat unlikely.

      I'm sure Apple has a version of Mac OS X plus some smaller apps going on i386, but forcing third-party vendors, many of which still are based on Carbon, to switch architectures, would massivly hurt the market, and that basically directly after th

      • If they try to dongle their own PC-based in some way, so that Mac OS X only runs on their own hardware, people will figure out how to get around this pretty quickly, so this is a non-starter as well.
        All they need is that 007 game...there's a buffer overflow exploit, ya know.
    • "You guys obviously didn't hear about the seeded developer testing of a "White box" from Apple."

      And you are obviously not aware that Apple engineers had the Mac OS running on Motorola 88K CPUs a long time ago (right before they settled on the PowerPC chipset for business reasons).

      Big whoop. Apple does this sort of thing all the time.

      "I don't see why Apple holds back, but it sure is cool to know that they have an ace up their sleeve..."

      I don't understand the source of your confusing because the reason ha

  • A non-complaining comment.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elemur ( 7613 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:36AM (#5744069)
    I think Apple, and the Apple/OS X community, are doing a great job with the package and ports management. Fink is effective and fast, if you like the apt model of software management. The new darwin ports model also sounds like a good idea. Given that its new, I would imagine that down the road they could unify and support more features from both worlds, and possbily support a single package database. (Or atleast a virtual database that aggregates both package dbs..)

    I saw complaints about speed, hardware, and so forth, but those aren't really applicable to the topic at hand. If you use an ancient box, it will be slow.. if you run a *reasonably* recent box and OS X, its a great experience. My Mac desktop is a 400Mhz G4, and its perfectly snappy. It beats my 600Mhz PIII notebook at most normal sorts of tasks.. if you are using the right software. (Remember a bit of overhead when running classic apps, etc..)

    I think the main thing missing is an easy to use GUI for package and application management. Perhaps they can solve one problem that remains in linux management, which is that the user has to see and worry about individual libraries and supporting applications. Should a user who wants a new version of Mozilla need to worry about the fact it will install some libpng (or whatever) library? Not really.. If they can go down that route, where you install aggregate packages (and still have the ability to fine tune as necessary), they will strike a good balance between the low level details and the user friendly environment OS X provides.

    • On library versions (Score:2, Interesting)

      by lowmagnet ( 646428 )

      This is why I really like OS X / NeXT frameworks. They are libraries just like libpng or any other, but they often contain legacy code in order to keep older applications working. You have a major, forward compatible revision, and a minor, backward compatible revision. Each major revision goes in its own framework tree, and each minor is stacked up inside that tree, so you either have libpng 1 or 2, and not multiple entries for 1.06-rc2 or whatever the developers happened to put out there.

      Unfortunately, th

  • Love FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @10:47AM (#5744123)
    If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times... The smartest decision ever made at Apple was to embrace FreeBSD as an important component of their operating system. I like their new OS very much as it performs reliably and efficiently. It is everything that a desktop UNIX operating system should be, especially now that X programs can run on the Mac OS desktop. Obviously, I am a lot happier about this because FreeBSD and the larger free software community benefits greatly from having a much larger user base and the support of a (relatively) successful company. (Even considering that Apple is doing all of this for their bottom line; but I'm glad that they're doing it in such a way that the side effects benefit the larger community.

    If you think I'm kidding, you can rest assured that your Linux distro includes something, somewhere, that came into existance as a result of Apple's work, whether directly or indirectly. Yeah... you know fully well that things get ported from one free software project to another. That's the whole point. (Ever seen the BSD license on something in your Linux distro? Yeah. That's right!) And if it wasn't "copied" as code, it was "copied" in theory.)

    I was an advocate of various Linux distros for a long time, until I finally tried FreeBSD. This was relatively recent: 3.3-RELEASE had just shown up in stores and I bought a boxed set that included the FreeBSD handbook. Not ten minutes passed after installation completed on one of my machines and I was hooked. Since that moment, I can't stand the SysV style that most Linux distros have adopted. SysV is just too complicated... all kinds of directory structures stretching on for infinity, and WHY?! FreeBSD puts everything at your fingertips. (No offense to Linux advocates and developers, as I continue to use Linux on many machines at home and at work. But I really do wish that BSD-style admin stuff would show up in more Linux distros... If I had the time to do it myself, I would have done it a long time ago. But as you know: 1, setting up a truly intuitive environment is difficult; and 2, I'm wasting all my time posting junk all over /. and don't have any time left to do useful stuff.)

    Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.

    Oh yeah... and keep up the good work, Jordan.

    • Re:Love FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Textbook Error ( 590676 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @11:07AM (#5744260)
      It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.

      Guess what, it's that same hardware that currently keeps Apple in business... An x86 Mac is never going to happen.

      Although they no doubt keep Mac OS X running on multiple platforms internally (it makes good sense from an engineering point of view), an x86 Mac is not in Apple's interests - 2 minutes after Apple released an x86 Mac + Mac OS X for x86, someone would have the OS running on some generic non-Apple hardware. Once that happens, nobody is ever going to buy an Apple machine when they could get their own box for less money.

      And there just isn't a market in selling OS software on the x86 platform - the vast majority of people either get Windows free with their hardware, or rip a copy off from a friend. The number of people who pay for their copy of Linux/Be/etc is nothing like enough to keep a company the size of Apple in business, even assuming that every non-Windows person decided to buy Mac OS X instead.

      A common suggestion is that Apple could build in some kind of dongle into the system to prevent the OS being modified to run on a generic box. The point this misses is that the only system like this which would ever work is the one they already use - their dongle is the Mac.

    • Re:Love FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bmetzler ( 12546 )
      I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.

      Please tell me why you are so interested in an x86 version of the iBook. Is it just the mhz myth that scares you?

      -Brent
      • MHz have nothing to do with anything. As a matter of fact, I am the guy who tells everyone to completely ignore MHz when buying a computer and to concentrate, instead, on the benefits provided by their potential new system.

        In my case, I need the x86 architecture because of my customer base, existing product and support issues, and last but not least, development tools, which must run under virtualization in VMware, a technical requirement that prevents the use of another (admittedly superior) processor. Run

    • Re:Love FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sentry21 ( 8183 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2003 @11:21AM (#5744348) Journal
      Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.

      Then you'll be waiting a long long time. Why on earth would Apple ever switch to x86? The power use is astronomical, the architecture is ungainly, ALL mac software would have to be ported (and believe me, that's no easy task), and it would lose all the hardware advantages it has - altivec, fast FPU instructions, the RISC-ish architecture.

      Apple has the PPC970 coming out from IBM, which will be (relatively) low power, fast, support vector instructions, and run at a 900 MHz DDR bus, to name a few. Why on earth would they throw away speed, compatibility, and reliability just to have a processor that's only better in name and for a few applications. Nonsense.

      Accept it. x86 is not going to happen, nor should it happen. It would suck, period. The machines wouldn't become any cheaper, they wouldn't become any faster, and the battery life would be cut in half if not more. Bad bad ugly idea.

      --Dan
    • I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable.

      Sure, OS X is portable. But the heritage programming APIs from Classic MacOS aren't. Carbon is heavily PPC reliant and it would be a near-impossible operation to port it over to x86. And with Carbon gone, so is a large chunk of Mac software, including killer apps such as Adobe Photoshop and M$ Office.

  • Find out where the DEC guys who wrote FX32 are working. If they are at apple, you have your answer.

    FX32, for those that don't know, was an add-on to NT for Alpha, that ran x86 binaries natively. And it was awesome. Although this will be sort of the reverse of that, the mindset is the same.

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