Re: FreeBSD 10 prognostication...

Umm, it's about as factual as The Onion, except not as funny.  FreeBSD
never had to "jettison two thirds of its code base and start from
scratch".  Apple is not involved in FreeBSD development.  No Mac OS X or
Darwin version "includes" FreeBSD.  FreeBSD and Mac OS X will never
merge.  FreeBSD was never acquired by WinDriver Systems or by anyone
else, although a company named WindRiver Systems (makers of the embedded
operating system VxWorks, not of Windows video drivers) did at one point
acquire BSDI, which had previously acquired Walnut Creek CD-ROM, which
was heavily involved in the early history of both FreeBSD and Slackware
Linux.  The remains of Walnut Creek CD-ROM and BSDI are now known as
FreeBSD Mall and iXsystems (of PC-BSD and FreeNAS fame).

DES
--
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des_at_des.no

I was a long-time subscriber to Slackware going back to Walnut Creek CDROM days (Slackware 96 to the best of my memory, but < 3.0).

I believe FreeBSD Mall and Slackware (store.slackware.com) are connected.  I had a difficult time terminating my Slackware subscription, customer service ignoring me, thought I was going to have to have my credit card number changed to jilt Slackware.  I noticed the similarity in subscription arrangement between FreeBSD Mall and store.slackware.com.

Slackware package system is geared to binary packages rather than building from source, and there is no tracking of dependencies.  A package can be installed even if dependencies are missing, and that even happened in Slackware releases, as I found when I tried unsuccessfully to run gnumeric many releases ago, got the message of missing library.  Seeing the better package managers in FreeBSD (ports), NetBSD (pkgsrc, and ported to other (quasi-)Unix OSes), and several Linux distributions is what made me not want to go further with Slackware.  Multimedia files failing to play may have been due to lack of proper package management.

Tom