On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 09:25:23PM -0400, Ian Murdock wrote: > > You don't get it. > > It doesn't matter if the common touchstone is just a kernel > or the kernel and the entire userspace. The source > code doesn't make a platform. The binaries make a platform. >
This man knows what he's talking about. Linux Journal no. 1 - 1994 - has an article on precisely _why_ a young Ian Murdock set out the Debian distribution with the principles he did. Love it or loathe it - and I suspect at times, Ian has done both :) - Debian is _the_ most successful completely open community of programmers that there is. That statement in and of itself is its own double edged sword :) > That's why we need OpenSolaris to be a binary distribution. > Hear, hear. I'd like a full Solaris system to be installed in under 20 minutes from binaries (and a pony, and a flying car and a Captain Crunch whistle and a secret decoder ring ... but I'd give up all these last for a Solaris that I could work with quickly and easily) [RANT - feel free to ignore :) ] If it were down to me, I'd re-integrate Nexenta with Debian and give the OpenSolaris reference platform to Debian to deal with. Not commercial: lots of experience on different architectures - now the _only_ major Linux to install on Sparc, for example - and with 32 and 64 bitness issues, and the upstream for Canonical's Ubuntu :) > Trust me. I've lived this mess for the last 10 years, and > it's been my job for the past 2 to try to clean it up, > which turns out to be very difficult to do after the fact.. > This man knows standards and the need to get commonality. His Progeny work and his LSB work showed that. For myself - I'm a Linux sysadmin who's been exposed to Solaris - usually admin'ed by other people, two or three releases behind and not well patched :( I've had the joy of Solaris 7 on Intel :( and the pleasure that was Debian of the same vintage on Sparc. I've had the joy of persuading standard GNU packages - gcc and Emacs - onto Solaris 8. I'd like the Sun Solaris kernel, ZFS and DTrace in my OpenSolaris, please: everything else is a bonus but I don't need cruft, I don't necessarily need two toolchains - though the option to switch and drop in a "traditional Sun" / GNU toolchain and compilation/library stack at a moment's notice would be very useful. I'd like an 18 month release cycle - so that there's time for some development and then a period of testing, testing, testing and eventual rock-solid stability. I now return you to the scheduled discussion on the colour of the bike shed :) [1] Andy [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed#References _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
