On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Irek Szczesniak <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Joerg Schilling > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Sriram Narayanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> I should clarify, I decided to address release engineering first, since > the > >> whole non-oracle Solaris community will need to get together to solve > the > >> problem of tracking package changes, have the tools to solve posix > >> compliance debates, and then start to write device drivers. > > > > Well, this is something I mention since years. I still hope there is a > way to > > collaborate - note that even the *BSDs that have been disintegrated > since a > > long time do important things together. > > > > What we of course first need is to decide on a minimal set of consensus. > > Which minimum set of consensus? The point is to go boldly forward with the > userland modernization where Illumos has failed with it's conservative > policy. If there was failure, it was with OpenSolaris programmers being too aggressive, and the rest of us inheriting the mess. Core OS functionality (booting, services, packaging, etc.) should not be dependent upon newer GNU userland, but based upon thoroughly debugged Solaris userland. These binaries should be separate and distinct locations (perhaps: /bin, /sbin, etc.) for simple maintenance and to enable easy embedding into smaller form-factors. If people wish to have a newer userland, where bugs are constantly being thrashed out, from other developers in other spheres (not interested in Solaris longevity) - then those should be put elsewhere and people should have the option to pick & choose (perhaps: /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/gnu/bin, /usr/fbsd, etc.) and those communities inherit the bugs those userlands suffer from. The core should be wary of suffering from external bugs that others may not approve fixes for or suffering from feature suppression where others may block innovation regarding. There is soooo much that is plain-old broken in gawk, even though it has some GREAT additional features, virtually nothing coded in any of the standards related awk will run in gawk. A standards-compliant userland is important for software compatibility. A modern userland is important for end-user comforth. Both are aggressively needed. Sun and Oracle, in OpenSolaris and Solaris 11, merged the standards-base and gnu-base userlands together without strict differentiation, contaminating the core OS services, which was perhaps the poorest engineering decision I have ever seen. I would hope others do not make the same mistake. The purpose of an OS is to run software - if existing commercial software will not run under the OpenSolaris splinter, there may be little reason for the splinter to exist, with the exception of some special purpose appliance. The usefulness of a special-purpose appliance running with an OpenSolaris kernel without USB3, WiFi, or clustered-ZFS support is puzzling to me... unless it is embedded - and then modernized userland becomes less important. Clearly, Illumos is driving OpenSolaris source code towards storage appliance and cloud-based hypervisor. Few in those groups understand the necessity of clustered ZFS for storage to provide good any-to-any H-A or D-R... this tells me those projects may not be long-for-this-world. I guess the rest of us need to decide what WE WANT out of an OpenSolaris splinter. I want a basic Desktop OS running SunRay Thin Clients, run some commercial apps, against a shared-nothing clustered back-end hypervisor. That's it. USB3 is a bonus, for faster external storage. WiFi would be a bonus for wireless storage. If no sunrays, then I need a cheap out-of-the-box thin-client alternative. I want support for SVR4 standards and a community effort to drive innovation (superset) in this arena. Thanks - Dave http://svr4.blogspot.com/
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