NetBSD's pkgsrc Bootstraps in Haiku

News by Jorge G. Mare on Tue, 01/19/2010 - 13:49

Haiku development keeps making progress in itself, but we are also seeing quite a bit of Haiku-related developments in other open source projects, this one coming from the NetBSD camp. According to an email from NetBSD developer Akio Obata, he has successfully bootstraped pkgsrc on Haiku. pkgsrc is the NetBSD Packages Collection, a framework with over 8000 packages that allows building third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems (supported platforms). Thanks to the work of Obata-san, support for Haiku is expected to be added to pkgsrc soon, hopefully in the next stable release named pkgsrc-2010Q1. We talked briefly with Obata-san, and here is a mini-interview with him.

Hello Obata-san. Please, first tell us a bit about yourself, your background, how you got involved in open source, that sort of thing.
I was born in 1970, in Okayama Prefecture, Japan. I bought my first PC before high school, and used it mainly to play music with MML, play games and hacking. :-P I met Unix (SunOS 4.0) at university. In my junior year, I spent way too much time at computer laboratory throughout the summer vacation. Read man, try to do commands, read man again, and so on (yes, no source code). In my senior year, I used to build source code taken from Usenet, write utilities with shell script, elisp... completely ignoring my undergraduate thesis :)

After graduation, I joined in SIer, and developed various software on various OSes such as SunOS, HP-UX, Windows NT, (Linux, AIX, MS-DOS, Mac), and languages such as C, C++, Java, JavaScript, scheme, Visual Basic, VBA, etc. Almost all of those projects used proprietary software (tools, libraries), then I often hit problems, and I said to myself: "It's probably not my fault, please show me your sources!"

On the side, back in 1996, I got for free an old but usable Sun Sparc Station 2 at the office; however, its pre-installed OS was too old (maybe Sun OS 4.0.?), so I planed to replace it. There were NetBSD and Linux for alternatives at the time, and I selected NetBSD because I never succeeded to install Linux neither at nor in the office; I also felt NetBSD was neater than Linux. I used the machine as mail and www server. I had been using pkgsrc on it since around 1999, which made maintenance easier.

At the time, when I started using NetBSD on my home server, some packages were missing, broken or dated, so I sent in patches, joined the pkgsrc-wip project, and imported some packages which were then integrated into the pkgsrc main tree. Finally, in August 2006, I joined the NetBSD project, and I'm now the maintainer of over 130 packages. I am also a member of the pkg-bug-handler group since 2007, and of the pkgsrc Security Team since 2008.

How and when did you get to know about Haiku, and what was your general impression then?
I think I read the news about OpenBeOS when it was renamed to Haiku on a magazine or the web. But the first time I really saw Haiku was at a Haiku seminar during the Kansai Open Source Forum 2007 event (note from editor: slides from this talk attached at the bottom of the article). I was curious about its file system, binary compatibility with BeOS, and porting to ARM. I feel Haiku is usable for lightweight gadgets, for example, my bed-side PC. :)
What was your motivation to work on porting pkgsrc to Haiku?
Now, I'm using pkgsrc on NetBSD, Mac OS X, and starting on Linux, Windows (with SUA). I think that pkgsrc is portable package system for POSIX environment, so it should be usable on Haiku too.
In what way do you see or expect your work to port pkgsrc benefit Haiku in the future?
Whatever Haiku may adopt its 3rd party package management system, pkgsrc will help Haiku users to manage additional software packages. Furthermore, pkgsrc is a good place to porting 3rd party software to Haiku, because pkgsrc people have much knowledge about portability and it is used by various platforms, so if patches for porting Haiku are acceptable for pkgsrc, upstream software developers will also accept those patches (I have sent upstream many patches for NetBSD and Mac OS X).
Any messages to the Haiku developers and/or community?
During the port of pkgsrc to Haiku, I saw many commit messages and bug reports for Haiku in various software projects. Thanks for your hard work! May I ask a favor? Could you fix NFS support on Haiku for easy to check that changes for Haiku are not result in adverse effect on other platforms. :)

We want to thank Obata-san for his work on adding Haiku support to pkgsrc, and for taking the time to reply to our questions.

We interviewed Akio Obata, a software developer from Okayama Prefecture, Japan, who is an active member of the NetBSD project in charge of maintaining over 130 pkgsrc packages.