On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Philip Brown wrote: > On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 02:08:50AM -0700, Alan DuBoff wrote: > > I think I'm on the same page with you Eric, and I am interested in trying > > to > > get the various people to at least lay out their needs and/or to work with > > Sun to figure out how that can be accomplished. > > [replying to an email moved from osol-discuss] > > Okay, here's what I think is the "needs list": >
You forgot the most important one: 0 - reproducibility / modifiability. That's exactly why I don't use blastwave or sunfreeware in their current incarnations > Addendum: Sun employees should have exclusive access to make changes. > "community" folks can always submit patches, whatever, but someone > at Sun, officially on behalf of Sun, has to approve and integrate > suggested changes. That will never scale. Something more like the Debian / Fedora Extras processes for community maintainership of the community's software packages seems saner > 4. Easy to get/update over the net, with no stupid > "sign/click to get access" limitations. Amen! Official Sun distribution methods usually involve a much larger PITA factor than is necessary ;-) > 6. The software should be provided as binary packages that are usable by > every single "currently supported" version of solaris recognized by Sun. > This may mean separate packages, for separate versions of the OS, > if extra-special compile options are desirable > fine by me. But no leaving Solaris 8 out in the cold, until it is > officially EOL'd by Sun. > If blastwave can do it, Sun sure as hell should be able to do it :-P If legacy support comes for free, sure. I don't think it does, though, and I'd much rather have a modern system going forward that meets all the other community needs > 7. The software packages need to be freely redistributable in and of > themselves. Anyone should be able to take one of the sun packages, and > put it on a website/ftp site/cdrom/dvd/bittorrent/WHATEVER, without > having to go through extra legal hoops. Goes hand-in-hand with 4. All the nonsense around, how, for example Solaris Express is distributed does dampen adoption.... later, chris
