Okay, just a bit of nitpicking here, but this sort of clarification is shows that drawing analogies can be very tricky in this realm.
On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Simon Phipps wrote: > Apologies, catching up after three contented days of exploring > national parks. > > On Oct 20, 2007, at 10:01, Stephen Lau wrote: > >> We are not like Ubuntu in that our projects and our code target >> multiple distributions. The work happening on Ubuntu's site >> ostensibly is all targeted towards Ubuntu. The work happening on >> OpenSolaris.org targets multiple consolidations, multiple projects, >> and multiple distributions. A part of Ubuntu is their Launchpad development site, which both hosts Ubuntu development and packaging infrastructure and serves similar purposes for a number of seperate projects. The system is able to express relationships between "external" projects (even off-site) and the Ubuntu derived packages to attempt co-ordination of development processes. > > Except Ubuntu does result in multiple distributions - Edubuntu, > Kubuntu, Gobuntu, xubuntu to name but four. They are not seperate distributions in the sense that they are defined as different "metapackages" drawing from a single package pool, analogous to package metaclusters (and indeed similar in implementation). They do have quasi-seperate groups of people working in different directions but it seems to be mostly inside the same community. > > As for not drawing parallels; I agree to the extent that we should > not actively model ourselves on another community. I believe that > highlighting the mis-match of expectations in the cases where some > people assert OpenSolaris is "just like the Linux kernel" as others > have done is important though. We are at a turning-point in the > OpenSolaris community, since it's clear (to me at least) that our > initial assumption of a kernel-based community with many external > distributions is no longer a good model. This is not least because > (as Ian points out) it fails to deliver the easy ability for there to > be a large pool of compatible applications. > > S. > Yes, looking at the problems exposed by other models is extremely helpful for avoiding these pitfalls. -Albert
