Hi Folks, Given the recent drastic changes happening in the OpenSolaris space some of us have been wondering about what is the next direction to take for BeleniX. Most of the BeleniX team have been quiet for a while and have been watching the developments to get a sense of the direction.
As you all know Oracle has closed down all open development and OpenSolaris no longer exists. Even source access has been closed down. Fortunately the illumos fork was launched just before the gates closed and now we also have OpenIndiana which is a well-made re-hash of the OpenSolaris distribution from the same source bases. All of these are community projects being driven collaboratively and openly and many of the brains in the Solaris exodus from Oracle have expressed support for these projects. So the logical direction for BeleniX is to start using illumos as the base kernel. However in addition to this we have also been thinking of aligning with the OpenIndiana distribution, essentially become a downstream variant offering a KDE based experience with a bunch of other customizations. This way we do not have to deal with the massive work of maintaining a complete distribution stack and can focus on other value additions - especially with limited resources. We also remain aligned and compatible with a central base and pool together efforts which is very much needed right now as all the opensolaris-based distro groups are very small. There is every benefit to be gained by collaboration at this scale. In addition we can also looking at using rpm5 as the package system for BeleniX with the Smart package manager being the tool for users. Smart package manager, yum-repositories and rpm5 are proven technologies used in enterprises for years and cross-platform as well. In addition the upstream is willing to cooperate on putting these technologies to work on an OpenSolaris base. So while we retain binary-level compatibility with OpenIndiana our packaging technology will differ. I believe there is value in trying out alternative technologies at this level as long as compatibility is retained. There are other questions about KDE development and toolchain to use. I feel that it is of long term value to focus on open-source toolchains like Gcc, Clang-Llvm etc. Clang has been successfully used to build Linux and FreeBSD kernels of late. These things should be looked at the Illumos kernel level as well. While that is a major project I are inclined to continue using our approach of building KDE 4.x on BeleniX with Gcc as opposed to SUN Studio - technical arguments apart we are FOSS die-hards and a distro cannot truely be complete FOSS unless the toolchain is also FOSS. So these are important directions, I feel. - Hide quoted text - So in a nutshell, we pull binaries from OpenIndiana and import them into RPM packages.We modify/rebuild a very limited number of existing OpenIndiana packages where necessary- for eg. rebuild some C++ libs required by KDE with Gcc. We also provide full set of customizations and tweaks that makes KDE on BeleniX a pleasure to use and unique. In addition we of course contribute to the main Illumos and OpenIndiana trunks. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ belenix-discuss mailing list http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-discuss http://groups.google.com/group/belenix-discuss
