Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

Excuse me for wading in here.

RE: CVS, the big change came as it was just too much work for OD  
developers to maintain a live CVS.
As OD only has access to the same source as everyone else, it was too  
much work to commit the changes between releases.

It is a shame, there were often ( albeit minor ) changes in the OD  
tree that weren't in Apple's.
It is gone, and it's time to move on.

I have a lot of respect for Shantonu Sen and Kevin Van Vechten for  
getting DarwinBuild up and running.
The amount of time having ( seemingly endless ) conversations on irc  
trying to understand Apple's build system .....

It is hard being on the outside of Apple, you put the time in  
preparing your diff, making sure it works,
then come the next release you have to start over, but at the same  
time Apple pays developers to work on features
that are still lacking in other OSes. Darwin is still lacking in  
other ways, but I guess Apple has to please
more of the people more of the time.

It is nice that Darwin runs stand-alone, hell if it didn't I would be  
worried, and I look forward to seeing an OD release in the future.  
Rob Braun is quite right, it is up to the community to make something  
of it. If it was taken in a new direction
and people were behind it, would Apple take notice ? why wouldn't they ?

I think the most discouraging thing for most people that come to  
Darwin is that they cannot get MacOS X for free
( unless you have a copy of OSX86 and you copy frameworks from  
DarwinX86 to allow it to run on a standard PC ;)

I wouldn't do such a thing of course, I hate x86.


S a m