Comment by wezm
1 month ago
What does the "focus on the FreeBSD ecosystem" and "feels native to FreeBSD" mean in practice? I.e. are there FreeBSD specific features being utilised that prevent it working on Linux, or other BSDs?
1 month ago
What does the "focus on the FreeBSD ecosystem" and "feels native to FreeBSD" mean in practice? I.e. are there FreeBSD specific features being utilised that prevent it working on Linux, or other BSDs?
Great question. In practice, 'native to FreeBSD' means a few things for grsh:
System Integration: I’m prioritizing first-class support for FreeBSD-specific tools and environments (like Jails and the Ports system). While many shells treat BSD as an afterthought, I want grsh to feel like it was built specifically for the FreeBSD base system.
Technical Implementation: Currently, I’m leveraging specific behaviors of the FreeBSD terminal driver and signal handling. While the Rust codebase is portable in theory, I’m not 'watering down' the features to guarantee Linux compatibility yet. I want to exploit FreeBSD’s strengths first.
License & Philosophy: The project is under the BSD-3-Clause license, which aligns with the ecosystem's preference for permissive licensing.
Can it work on Linux/other BSDs? Yes, it can be compiled on Linux, but you might find that certain job control nuances or terminal optimizations are currently 'tuned' for the FreeBSD kernel. I’d rather have it work perfectly on one OS than 'okay-ish' on all of them.