Extreme Open Source

I've been hacking (in the neckbeard sense of the word) Darwin for a couple of months solidly now, and have decided to christen the experience "Extreme Open Source". What's the difference between this and normal open source? It's the difference between "Sports" and "Extreme Sports". Basically, the difference can be summed-up as "why the hell would you want to do that when there are plenty of equally exciting but exponentially safer alternatives?" I think insanity plays a part.

It would be easy for me to type some stuff here about the bloody shocking state of the Darwin source code, but I've slowly come to the realisation that that isn't the problem. The source is, in fact, of quite excellent quality. The problem is it simply isn't designed to compile and run separately from the proprietary parts of OS X. And it's not just the Foundation-and-Objective-C using components, either. I've spent the past fortnight writing implementations of two function groups — CFNotificationCenter and CFFileDescriptor — which are absent from CFLite but relied upon by (the really rather vital) DirectoryService daemon.

darwinbuild — the chroot environment designed for compiling the separate projects — can be an exercise in frustration. When it works it's an absolute dream: packages are downloaded, dependencies met and code neatly assembled and arranged. But when it doesn't you're left pretty much helpless. I'm currently bashing my head (and not for the first time) against the fact that one particular tool (copystrings) is written in Ruby and yet there's no working Ruby install in the chroot and all my attempts to install one have failed. And without copystrings — which does exactly what its name suggests and so shouldn't be the most complicated application ever written — certain builds fail before they even really begin. In this case I'm trying to build a version of the DHCP-marshling IPConfiguration which doesn't rely on Apple's closed-source 80211 code. Working, pure-source networking is one broken script away.

So there you have Extreme Open Source: it's stressful, time consuming, and while you're working on it there's always this nagging suspicion at the back of your mind that as soon as you reach the finish line Apple's going to turn around and say, "Actually... I think we're going to close source all this stuff."