On May 11, 2013, at 9:12 AM, Bryan Cantrill <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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.
I concur with the concern. That's where the ability to fork should allow us
to avoid this. Even if the "reference" were just a trailing fork, that would
work pretty well, at least for now. That said, I *think* Omni's purpose for
illumos is largely compatible with the vision here -- they seem to be trying to
be much more general purpose than I think SmartOS (or our own variant at DEY),
for example. Largely this means that most of the changes they contemplate are
IMO likely to be acceptable to most or all of the existing illumos / OI users.
Admittedly, they've made some changes that some of the folks who still want
things to work exactly like they did in 1995 aren't going to like. :-)
(Btw, this concern is also true of OI. The desire to solve it without putting
undue burden on the distro folks was part of the impetus for my original call
for a reference distro.)
>
> Stupid question (and not meant to be a troll): how does Linux handle this?
Good question indeed. I *think* Linus chooses a distro to work with, and the
distros probably work hard to convince him to use theirs. Ultimately, Linus
*is* the decider though, because when all is said and done, Linux is run as a
dictatorship rather than a democracy. The distros of course all do their own
QA as well, so there is less need for a centralized reference, IMO. (Largely
because they have the resources to be able to afford the redundant effort more
easily than we can.)
- Garrett
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