On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 12:15 AM, Moinak Ghosh <moinakg at belenix.org> wrote: > Hi Folks, > > ?It has been quiet around here for some time, since all of us are > very busy with our lives and work. Different people have been going > through different changes including lots of pressure @ work. However > finally things are moving forward and I am making progress on the > next 0.8 release. There is a major list of tasks: > > * Testing with B111 and subsequently B112 > * Updated FOX build > * Pull updated JDS spec files and patches and rebuild. The default JDS > ?packaging is broken up into more sane meaningful packages. > * Updated SFW packages. Begin preparing spec files for SFW gate > ?packages. SFW package metadata is brain-dead! > * Build KDE 4.2 (This one is huge) > * Test the new Ramdisk compression mechanism I implemented. > * Get extended partition support > * spkg fixes and testing > * General package upgrades and new packages. > > and various other things. > > Now for the most interesting development. BeleniX as a distro is > growing in complexity and size and any large project to continue > successfully and meet user needs has to grow in number of developers. > Currently the size of the BeleniX team is really small with myself putting > most of my free time working on it. This state cannot continue indefinitely. > So options are either build a community or join one. Building an OS > community around a distro is easier said than done and none of us has > the time or wherewithal to do this from scratch. Joining a growing developer > and user community is the most easier option esp. when that community > also looks at things in ways similar to our approach and also brings > interesting new ideas to the table. So we have been considering working > closely with the OSUNIX community (http://www.osunix.org/index.jspa) > to pool together our efforts and get innovations and new developments > moving faster. That community is doing a lot of cool stuff and growing > in developers. So we are looking at working together and BeleniX being > a primary delivery vehicle for the results of that combined work. This > consideration has been floating for some time and frankly now we are > quite excited by this prospect.
Here's some history for those who may not be aware of the context behind a lot of decisions. At present, we're dependent on SVR4 packaging. For various genuine reasons, we need to move away from SVR4 packaging. These reasons are best documented in the ARC case for IPS. Clearly, an alternative to the srv4 packaging is needed. While the user experience with IPS is excellent, it is excellent only for those with high speed connections to the Internet. There are some other concerns that we had as the Belenix community and this was discussed some time last year with the IPS community. Our core concerns (why not use an existing mechanism) were not addressed. This discussion is available on the IPS mail archives. At the same time, we needed to move away from the blastwave based pkg-get because that package downloading tool was not really redistributable - something that we discovered only after an unfortunate controversy surrounding blastwave sometime last year. The developer of the pkg-get tool (not Dennis Clark) responded to a mail from Moinak stating that pkg-get was not released under an open source license. Nexenta has done some good work on porting apt and dpkg to opensolaris. For Belenix to move to this would involve considerable effort since we'd have to understand that mechanism, port our spec files as necessary, and modify pkgbuild to generate .deb files. So, we decided to go ahead with a a temporary implementation as a replacement for the blastwave pkg-get. We really needed just a replacement tool which would download svr4 packages (.pkg files) from the belenix server, and run use pkgadd to install those packages. We decided this over a phone call + IM conversation after an IRC discussion at freenode.net#blastwave, where we'd learned of the pkg-get issue (among other things). Moinak spent the next two nights and created spkg. Some of us tested this, and we were happy with the results. Moinak being Moinak, he went on to spend a few more night adding features to it which would make it equivalent of IPS in terms of featues, while continuing to use SVR4 for the actual package format. While we were supposed to eventually move to apt/smart/yum after an evaluation, we also realized that with a working spkg, the urgency to move was not so much. We could afford to step back, take stock of the situation, and then address larger problems if any. One definite large problem is the size of the developer community. At present, Moinak is the sole active developer on Belenix. The rest of us who have pitched in at various times are swamped with everyday office work. We realized that Moinak was now spending more time maintaining packages than innovating. A larger development community was definitely needed. Sometime during this time, codestr0m wrote in to the belenix-discuss with his proposal for a 64 bit opensolaris base distro effort #osunix. Some of us have spent time on #osunix, and Moinak has pitched in to help codestr0m address several build and other issues. During our conversations, Moinak and I realized that osunix is a larger community of developers from various opensolaris projects and interests. Belenix anyway needs a new packaging format, a well maintained package repository and a larger developer community. This may involve moving to a different build mechanism and a different packaging format. If we think of the osunix effort as a platform, then Belenix would be one of the many efforts contributing to, showcasing, and making use of that platform. There are different people who want to achieve different things based on opensolaris. Some want to enter the storage space, others want to a crossbow based network firewall/router device, yet others may want something else (servers for build, media, communication, etc). All of us can work together to ensure that osunix works fine as a platform, and can then use the build and packaging mechanism for our specific needs. Belenix would then be one such consumer - a KDE based distro which uses osunix build and packaging mechanisms. > > So expect changes happening and new builds/releases coming out after > the 0.8 release train is out. So drop your feedback on this list, what do > people think ? Recently, Moinak and I realized that for those of us long involved with the Belenix effort, we've simply had a conversation with each other in person or over the phone, or over IM, and then gone ahead with what ever needs doing. This will need to change, of course, with discussions happening more on a mailing list than in person. -- Sriram
