

PureDarwin - Community project to make Darwin more usable - ics
http://www.puredarwin.org/

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aaronbrethorst
No blog updates since Dec 2012, no forum posts since April...

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/puredarwin](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/puredarwin)

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progx
Obviously nobody is interessted. Not because the system is bad, because Apple
user want to use Apple and not an Open Source alternative.

It make more sense to create a good emulator, so you can use OpenSource System
(like Debian, BSD,...) and native Mac OS Software.

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jws
I would be thrilled to have a solid Darwin that runs on commodity hardware so
the servers could run the same code as the clients. The last I looked at
actually running Darwin it looked like there was no effort from Apple to
maintain a runnable Darwin. The lowest risk option was writing the code twice,
a waste of resources we could have done without.

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cantankerous
Which servers and which software? I'm curious. Most of the stuff in that realm
is platform independent, anyway.

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jws
I want to run my own daemons on the server. But I want them to be written in
Objective-C and use the Foundation libraries. This is all part of Apple's
Darwin released code, it just doesn't run on anything.

I want to have access to the instant scalability of the various VPS and
dedicated box providers, but with Apple ecosystem code.

Apple abandoned the datacenter hardware market long ago, unfortunately, they
took the datacenter deployment options with them.

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delinka
I don't understand the motivation for this project. OpenDarwin (yes, not
PureDarwin) was motivated by putting Darwin on Intel, and when Apple moved to
Intel processors, it pretty much killed OpenDarwin's steam. I get that people
have their pet projects and do things "because they can," but attempting to
drum up support for your project from the community requires that you explain
to people why they should care.

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zimbatm
Some people are interested in learning how things work. In that case the main
page's description is enough to get them going.

I don't think that every project needs to be treated like a commercial
product. This kind of project usually doesn't have a direct value to consumers
but prepares the ground for other projects. It can help better understand the
OS and help jailbreak IOS. Or provide drivers to install OSX on a PC or a VM
and then allow cross-OS browser testing. Or maybe help a wine-like project for
OSX apps. Who knows but without that project all these might not happen
because the barrier to entry might be too high.

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danbmil99
And this is better than Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc. because -- what?

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gilgoomesh
It's usefulness is source level compatibility with Mac OS. It's a tool for
understanding Mac OS, testing Mac components in a detached fashion,
redistributing Mac software without proprietary baggage or running a pseudo
Mac environment on commodity server hardware.

Even as a standalone OS, a comparison with other BSDs is far more appropriate.

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pjmlp
That proprietary baggage is what makes Mac OS X worthwhile as an OS.

Without Objective-C and all the frameworks that make up the OS, it is no
better than using a *BSD.

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asveikau
> Without Objective-C

GNUstep.

> it is no better than using a *BSD.

Actually it's quite likely to be worse. Is there any good reason Apple is
using that Mach stuff other than momentum and having developers who know it
well? IMO any given BSD project has a more coherent design than XNU.

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pjmlp
GNUStep is almost dead project, it was being developed already before Apple
bought NeXT, and it is still not there.

The way the web site gets updated, looks like a software project connected to
a machine, without proper support for the latest Objective-C versions, who
would bet on it for production code?

Every time I see them at FOSDEM I look forward to see better updates, but it
always looks the same.

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asveikau
I used to use and develop with GNUstep (just small personal projects) for a
good chunk of the 2000s decade, until I lost interest. A lot of the important
stuff is there. AFAIK they have parity with 10.4 or so.

It's true that there isn't a lot of momentum behind the project. I suspect
that's just a lack of people. I wonder if they'd be receptive if some folks
just jumped in and implemented more of the missing stuff. I am guessing yes.

The spirit of my comment is: you can't say objc doesn't exist outside of
Apple. It's there in some form. It might even more "there" if people start
using and developing it. We as individuals have the power to do that.
Dismissing it very early strikes me as defeatist.

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pjmlp
> you can't say objc doesn't exist outside of Apple

Sure, it exists in a form as if we were in 2005, away from all Objective-C 2.x
goodies, more recent frameworks and tooling.

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asveikau
... which is not nothing. These developments come from somewhere, I don't
understand why one would bash GNUstep because it's not a unicorn.

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pjmlp
I am not bashing it, just stating the hard reality that the project is
stagnated.

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buster
Would it be feasible to have Debian + Darwin? I am wondering about driver
availability.. Does Darwin support all hardware FreeBSD does? Is it stripped
down to Mac-like hardware?

And in general what would i get from using Darwin as opposed to Linux or *BSD
apart from the ability to run a limited amount of Mac-only commandline tools?

Also, looks like a dead project..

Also, given that Apple moves away from open source more and more [1], i really
wouldn't go down that road... you'll end up surrounded by proprietary
software, extensions, drivers more likely then not.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/103674611711666213369/posts/7j1c2bZ7...](https://plus.google.com/103674611711666213369/posts/7j1c2bZ7jJb)

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LukeShu
> Does Darwin support all hardware FreeBSD does? Is it stripped down to Mac-
> like hardware?

I think you have the common misconception that Darwin uses the FreeBSD kernel.
It does have components from FreeBSD, and one of the principal engineers was
the founder of FreeBSD. However, the kernel is actually Mach+XNU (Mach is a
micro-kernel, XNU is a Unix-kernel-like wrapper around it).

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0x09
This is just being pedantic, but XNU is the name of the whole kernel, which
describes the combination of Mach and the BSD interfaces.

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kazagistar
The reason interest is going to be so low is that, generally speaking, it is
pretty easy to just have software that runs on both Linux and OSX, cross
compile for both, an use the Linux kernel instead of trying to use a binary
compatible kernel... which lacks anything resembling a proper environment.

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adamnemecek
Reminds me a lot or ReactOS
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS)

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runn1ng
AFAIK, this project is dead for years

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ics
This project has been "dead" for about 6 months or so. Personally I don't
thing that should matter much– it's an interesting project, and the more
exposure it gets the better chance it has at being rejuvenated.

