Development proposal

[bmelo]

Hi, I am a C and Python developer as also FreeBSD-family user and Manjaro user. I'm loving Manjaro, specially Pamac and all its own utilities like Manjaro Hello, Calamares and Manjaro Settings Manager.

Yesterday I have had an idea: I'd like my FreeBSD be so awesome like Manjaro is for GNU/Linux. So I thought about starting to port (and rewrite when impossible) Manjaro tools to FreeBSD.

I know GhostBSD faces manpower difficulties. So why not propose to use already-written tools for GhostBSD future? I can help on it.

Bye.

[kraileth]

Hi bmelo and welcome to the forums!

I've been an Arch Linux user before I switched to FreeBSD and I've installed Manjaro and Antergos for some friends. Pacman is definitely a great package manager that I liked a lot. I'm not completely sure if it fits well into the FreeBSD world. A few years earlier - perhaps. But now we have pkg and it's working perfectly fine. Also Pacman has the downside that it's not BSD-license. But did you know that there is a FreeBSD distribution that uses Pacman? It was once known as ArchBSD but later renamed to PacBSD.

If however you were thinking about porting the GUI tools over so that they can be used with FreeBSD's pkg - that could be an interesting thing. I don't remember Manjaro Hello off the top of my head. When it comes to Calamares, I have bad rather bad memories of it (it's been some time, though, I could be wrong). But Pamac - why not? Ignoring the minor flaw that is the license, it has the benefit of using GTK3 while OctoPkg (which GhostBSD uses now) is Qt-based.

Could you elaborate a little on Manjaro Hello and why you think Calamares is a good installer? How do you think ZFS fits in there?

[bmelo]

Manjaro Hello is for new comers. The user can find resources for the distro like documentation, support and more about the distro.

Manjaro Settings Manager is the more important. There you can set date and time, user accounts, locales and languages, find and download drivers for your system, configure keyboard layout and download a new version of linux kernel. We, FreeBSD guys, could replace the kernel download for something userful for us, like managing jails with iocage and VMs with iohyve. We could include beadm GUI like TrueOS has too.

Well, Calamares is stable for me all the time I have installed Manjaro. Calamares is modular, all configuration "page" of it is a module. We can replace the traditional disk partitioning module for Linux and add one for FreeBSD.

If GhostBSD is already using Octopkg so there is no need to port Pamac for pkg. I see Pamac uses libalpm, so it's just switch to libpkg and adapt to its features. But Octopkg is fine, maybe we just need to help it keep in sync with Octopi changes.

[ericbsd]

Hi bmelo,

Octopkg it is only a solution until I finish the software manager I started and clearlly it is not my primary goal to finish. I started it like three year ago.

I would be glad to have more help for sure!

I am not a fan of GPL, but I do tolerate LGPL, It is why I write new GTK toll instead of porting from GNU/Linux. I have no problem using GPL code, but if I could, I would replace everything by BSD, MIT and another type of CopyFree license.

Also, I was not very vocal about it, but next GhostBSD will be under TrueOS Core instated of FreeBSD, my manager(jmaloney) is doing most of the work on making all the change in ghostbsd-build. The major difference in OpenRC, LibreSSL and base packaging.

GhostBSD need manpower for sure since ASX quite rolling packages don't have someone taking care of it, sure it is mostly all automatic it is not so bad, and I know how to make everything work.

All that said I hope to ear more.

[bmelo]

Ok so.
I disagree using TrueOS. TrueOS is a toy OS. We can't use it for job purposes because it is very unstable and does not get any bug fix in stable repository. I can't suggest TrueOS to replace Fedora in the company I'm working for because it's even worst (buggier) than Fedora. Sad to see the only clean FreeBSD desktop distro turning into a TrueOS one. But I respect it, it is your project.
Thanks for your time.

[ericbsd]

Ok so.
I disagree using TrueOS.

Not a problem I don't expect everyone to agree with me.

TrueOS is a toy OS. We can't use it for job purposes because it is very unstable and does not get any bug fix in stable repository.

I did thought the same thing until I use it for work. I dought you have been using TrueOS using lately, but I have been running unstable for work for almost four months I did only have one issue that I had it is was an update that I have stops, and in TrueOS it's not a good practice to do, like most OS. Other than that it has been stable for an unstable there problem with the update manager and I voice my opinion and it got fixed. Not only that soon I will start right code to automate TrueOS testing. TrueOS Package builds already have some kind automation test to if some pkg is missing.

Also, Bugs will be less and less prone to happen more the time goes I will put the time and efforts to make it a better system then FreeBSD itself. FreeBSD is for servers and not desktops/laptops. There is a lot of ideas on the table for TrueOS.

Note that GhostBSD will not take the same approach than TrueOS for updates, and we will support UFS and ZFS, but the system will be TrueOS, and most users will not see a big difference other than OpenRC and package base update.

I can't suggest TrueOS to replace Fedora in the company I'm working for because it's even worst (buggier) than Fedora.

Like I said I use my costumTrueOS for work and a lot of co-workers use it for work too. Buggier than Fedora in the passe yes, but TrueOS have come from a long way, and it is more and more stable to the point that I am confident to move to TrueOS for GhostBSD on next release.

Sad to see the only clean FreeBSD desktop distro turning into a TrueOS one. But I respect it, it is your project.
Thanks for your time.

Yeah, it was bound to happen FreeBSD does not meet my goals anymore for GhostBSD and sure I like FreeBSD for what it is but the development is to slow for adding new features in new releases. I also enjoy of dogfooding on the system that the company I work for develop and develop my solution on top of it.

[dinsdale]

Hi bmelo,

Octopkg it is only a solution until I finish the software manager I started and clearlly it is not my primary goal to finish. I started it like three year ago.

I would be glad to have more help for sure!

I am not a fan of GPL, but I do tolerate LGPL, It is why I write new GTK toll instead of porting from GNU/Linux. I have no problem using GPL code, but if I could, I would replace everything by BSD, MIT and another type of CopyFree license.

Also, I was not very vocal about it, but next GhostBSD will be under TrueOS Core instated of FreeBSD, my manager(jmaloney) is doing most of the work on making all the change in ghostbsd-build. The major difference in OpenRC, LibreSSL and base packaging.

GhostBSD need manpower for sure since ASX quite rolling packages don't have someone taking care of it, sure it is mostly all automatic it is not so bad, and I know how to make everything work.

All that said I hope to ear more.

I like OctoPkg. What's the use case that you have that it doesn't support?

So what's this now about moving to TrueOS? Does that mean you will no longer be tracking RELEASE?

[ericbsd]

I like OctoPkg. What's the use case that you have that it doesn't support?

GhostBSD is a GTK project, not a QT like OctoPkg, I have planned to have our own software manager in the future which I want it to be more simple and straightforward.

So what's this now about moving to TrueOS? Does that mean you will no longer be tracking RELEASE?

TrueOS supports more hardware than FreeBSD releases, and I also started to Contribute to TrueOS, and I will even start to write code for automation testing for TrueOS soon. Some people have asked us to supports OpenRC merging our effort with TrueOS will make things easier for both projects. There is one thing GhostBSD will still look the same and work the same we are only using the base, not the tool.

So for releases, we will track TrueOS releases their first, and latest version of TrueOS is 17.12.

Also, we might continue to release FreeBSD base system but it is not clear for now if we will do that..

[dinsdale]

I like OctoPkg. What's the use case that you have that it doesn't support?

GhostBSD is a GTK project, not a QT like OctoPkg, I have planned to have our own software manager in the future which I want it to be more simple and straightforward.

So what's this now about moving to TrueOS? Does that mean you will no longer be tracking RELEASE?

TrueOS supports more hardware than FreeBSD releases, and I also started to Contribute to TrueOS, and I will even start to write code for automation testing for TrueOS soon. Some people have asked us to supports OpenRC merging our effort with TrueOS will make things easier for both projects. There is one thing GhostBSD will still look the same and work the same we are only using the base, not the tool.

So for releases, we will track TrueOS releases their first, and latest version of TrueOS is 17.12.

Also, we might continue to release FreeBSD base system but it is not clear for now if we will do that..

While I applaud the TrueOS support and everything that pushes FreeBSD forward, it means there is no FreeBSD "distro" that I know of featuring a GUI following FreeBSD-RELEASE cycles. Can you expand on your "we might continue..." comment? Can you tell me what is the limiting factor (time, technical limitations)?

The background to my questions is that when Kris Moore announced the move to CURRENT, I went looking for other distros. I think Ghost at the time was still tracking FreeBSD 8 so I tried to contribute to DesktopBSD. When Joe dropped out, I didn't have the bandwidth to fill in the blanks.

I'm indifferent to the init system[1], but need something on release. It's probably taken me longer to worry about it than to figure out how to get X11 and a desktop working, but it's not about me, it's about having it available to everyone [2].

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm attempting to gauge your response and if the minimal amount of time I could contribute towards testing would be enough...



[1] - Actually it's quote opposite, I'd love to see openRC on FreeBSD current and want to get it working on Arm. At one point I wanted to try building TrueOS for arm but wanted to find a board that's worth using ZFS on (2 +gb of memory). Some of the new aarch64 boards hold much promise.
[2] - And you seem to have all the tools sorted out at this point. I'm also no longer keen on seeing another "distro" as the community is too small.

[ericbsd]

I work with Kris and Joe, and Joe and I share common goal about GTK desktop On BSD, we did talk about having GhostBSD move to TrueOS Core for quite sometimes. Lately, after some discussion, we started to think to continue to release FreeBSD base system, and GhostBSD builds from TrueOS Core. With FreeBSD, it is one release every year, and with TrueOS it is a release every six months.

Lately, Joe has rewritten the whole code to build iso, and that did fix an amount of problem we had in the live session so the next live DVD/USB should work better for everyone.