On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Garrett D'Amore <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On May 10, 2013, at 4:59 PM, Paul B. Henson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > (I crossposted this to both discuss@ and developer@, please reply only > to discuss@; I know some of the developers don't watch discuss@, but was > hoping they might want to contribute this time). > > > > Historically OpenIndiana has been the primary illumos development > environment. There's some discussion over on the OpenIndiana dev list about > the current and future status of the project. Some people say it's dead, > other people want to revive it; without commenting on or starting a > discussion about that, I think it's fair to say it's mostly stagnant right > now. > > > > There was some talk once of starting an illumos "reference" distribution > for development purposes, did anything ever come of that? If not, is there > any interest in putting together a "supported" configuration for core > illumos development under omnios? ("supported" mostly just meaning being > able to discuss issues or problems without worrying about the development > environment itself causing the issue or problem, used by at least some of > the core developers would also be a plus :) ). > > Nothing came of it. It got bikeshedded into oblivion because people > wanted "reference" to mean desktops, GUIs, and a bunch of other stuff that > fully departed from what I was trying to achieve. > > I'd still like to have a base environment as an accepted reference for > developing the illumos core itself. For those purposes, I don't care about > all the other gadgets and desktop goodies, office suite, etc. It needs to > be able to run and validate the things we have in illumos-gate… plus the > minimal amount required to self host that bit. > > I think OmniOS is almost there -- the "problem" is that OmniOS has made > some changes (IMO good ones) that illumos has not -- specifically nixing a > bunch of the broken or ancient printing infrastructure. With these > changes, it is not possible to compile stock illumos on OmniOS (or at least > it wasn't the last time I tried). > > IMO, the best solution for us is to adopt the same change in illumos -- > but this gets into another rat hole discussion -- because some people > apparently *like* those crappy crufty printing tools. I'm strongly of the > opinion that we ought to just go ahead in spite of those complaints, as the > source for the SystemV printing stuff will always remain available in tree > for any distro or site that really wants it. I think its time for the > needs of the many to outweigh the needs of the few … and those who want to > stick with the SYSV printing stuff are definitely the few (albeit a vocal > few). > > (There may be *other* changes that limit OmniOS from building stock > illumos-gate -- I'm not at the moment immediately aware of any aside from > the printing problem.) > > The other problem with using OmniOS for this is that OmniOS is totally > controlled by a single commercial entity, which is distasteful for some > people. As for myself, I'd be willing to overlook that and accept that if > Omni ever decided to go seriously astray we could always fork *their* work. > I don't see that being likely any time soon though. > Theo and company can (and presumably will) speak for himself here, but I think one of the problems of using OmniOS from their perspective is that you might constrain their future development. Speaking for SmartOS, it's been very important for us to be able to get "ahead" of illumos with certain key things -- additions or modifications that were essential for us, but that we accepted would either not be appropriate upstream at all (several of our branding changes come to mind) or not appropriate on a timeframe in which we needed it (for example, our per-thread caching libumem work). I think it would be unfair to OmniOS to saddle it with a "reference" designation if that meant they were constrained in their own decisions -- their decision to rip out printing being presumably only the first example of this. Stupid question (and not meant to be a troll): how does Linux handle this? - Bryan ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
