I'm back in action, and have started my work on Belenix. Here are my own thoughts on other discussions that have come up on this thread: - People should be able to choose what they want. If someone wants Solaris tools + API as of b147, then that should be possible. If someone wants FreeBSD userland and other tools, then that should be possible too. If someone wants to be able to selectively mix and match, then that should be possible as well. I also feel that with some concrete steps, we can resolve all manner of issues - which tr/sed/od/ksh should be bundled, what is POSIX compliance at a tool level, etc.
The areas that I've not thought about too much in detail are - what does it take to add modern device driver support to illumos, should we take Linux drivers and make them available as separately downloadable modules built from separate source repos, which commits from b147 onwards are acceptable/need-to-be-reverted, etc. At the moment, I'm not skilled enough to take such calls. What I am skilled at is the area of release engineering, and I intend to set in place something that could potentially benefit all distros as well as the open source software eco-system as a whole. More updates from me as I make concrete progress. -- Sriram On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 3:28 PM, Irek Szczesniak <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 7:25 PM, james <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Correct and for this reason, Illumos did change too much at some places >>> already. >>> >>> Solaris Old-timers like to have standard compatibility and backwards >>> compatibility. >> >> >> Well, as an outside observer who has worked on Solaris and Linux >> professionally, I'd have to say: >> >> Some of the behaviour wrt these issues has been bizarrely focussed on de >> jure standardisation and backwards compatibility *for its own sake* and one >> can but hope that some lessons might be learned by recent events. >> >> I'm not joking when I suggest just throw in with FreeBSD. It is at least a >> neutral venue compared to the two positions we've had with >> solaris-stuck-in-the-muds and lets-be-linux-brigade, and I don't see too >> much moaning about either gratuitous change or stasis one way or the other >> about FreeBSD. It also has active user-space and workstation development >> from PC-BSD and active NAS development too. >> >> I use Red Hat daily at work and any non-standardisation is mildly annoying >> at worst, and generally completely irrelevant and a non-issue. >> >> Being compatible with FreeBSD might not be backwards compatible with >> Solaris, or compatible with the selfish anarchy of Linux, but it is at least >> compatible with something that isn't either already totally irrelevant or >> rapidly becoming so. >> >> What the free solaris kernel seems to need most is device drivers and if the >> way to achieve that is in fact to sacrifice all the old de jure >> standardisation for its own sake, then I'd throw my support that way >> anytime: I already gave up on OI derivatives because FreeBSD actually works >> on my hardware and I can have ZFS that way. > > Well, I'm strongly against importing more tools from FreeBSD. the > damage caused by Garrett D'Amore eager "adopt FreeBSD tools to fill > our needs" project has created gaping holes in > functionality/interoperability and as side effect imported all the > damn FreeBSD bugs, too. IMO the changes to tools like tr, sed and many > others must be reversed because multibyte character handling is > grossly broken now and all the other issues caused by that. > > Irek > _______________________________________________ > belenix-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-dev -- ------------------------------------ Belenix: www.belenix.org Twitter: @sriramnrn _______________________________________________ belenix-discuss mailing list http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-discuss http://groups.google.com/group/belenix-discuss
