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Re: Switching to GNU userland and tools - yay or nay?



On 04.10.2017 12:49, Leon Taylor wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I am wanting to switch from the default BSD userland (I know that "userland" is an extremely generic term, but in my case I am talking about the defualt set of programs that NetBSD provides) to the GNU userland, which would mean replacing BSD make, mailx, the core utilities, internet tools, and NetBSD's version of libc (and anything else that I have forgotten) with the GNU alternatives.
> Would this cause any issues and how would I make the GNU programs and utilities the defaults? (I know Linux has the update-alternatives command, does NetBSD have an equivalent command?). 
> Sorry if this seems like a daft question.
> Thanks, Leon
> 

The best option is to build GNU tools from pkgsrc and configure them in
your PATH.

If you are looking for NetBSD kernel based solution with whole GNU
userland, you are on your own. There is no functional toolchain support
for this setup and lack of support in GNU tools (including GLIBC).

There was an attempt to create Debian GNU/kNetBSD in the past, but since
it wasn't solving any real problems, instead of creating new ones - it
was abandoned.

An intermediate solution is to resurrect Gentoo portage hosted on
NetBSD, but this also involves fixing GNU tools. It won't bootstrap
as-is because we keep local patches to GNU tools in pkgsrc.

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