Sascha Wildner has committed mandoc(1) to DragonFly to use for man, whatis, apropos, and other functions. One less GNU utility, and also means groff can come out of the base system. That is almost the last C++ code in base… I am not sure what remains.
8 Replies to “man and groff out, mandoc in”
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GCC and the gold linker are both written in C++. So are LLVM and Clang, so even replacing the GCC build environment with them won’t completely remove C++ from base.
That leaves pcc as a compiler option, though I don’t know how realistic, or necessary, that would be to try.
my absolute dream is a trimmed down dfly that fits a cd (still a thing for me) and maybe the entire thing even statically linked? against (pcc, really? speaking from memories or what?) tcc. -> repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git and github.com/TinyCC/tinycc
ultimate dreamer: you could, in theory, do that now with the right settings… WORLDCC, I think? I am not sure but the various steps around clang would work the same for another compiler.
Whether it could build world and kernel, who knows. An interesting experiment!
IMO, an even more useful thing would be a dfly, that boots from USB or SD flash medium, that can be removed after startup. The system would reside in RAM with no need for harddisks (which could still be used for persistent storage, if present). What I don’t understand though, is the standard of installation. Usually, you would boot a system and not switch it off until the next version is out, no?
You can do that now by PXEbooting. The installer image can even be used as a server for it; it’s quite nice.
But PXE requires multiple computers being around. It doesn’t quite cover the scenario.
No, it doesn’t quite fit… but if you are using a BSD, the chance of spare bootable equipment laying around is pretty good.