Roger, My comments are in Blue:
Thousands of FreeBSD server admins would strongly disagree agree > with this. I know I spend far less time keeping BSD ports up to > date than with binary RPMs. But please do explain, Rajiv, what > your experience with BSD ports is and why you believe they require > more technical knowledge than binary RPMs. To tell you the truth, the last time I was working on BSD was in 1996-98 and have not touched it since. Also if what you say is true, why is it still not popular even thought it existed even before Linux became popular? Dependency resolution is identical between source and binary > distributions. The advantage to source-based systems is that > end-users can choose, for example, whether they want to compile > SASL/TLS/LDAP dependencies with their MTA. They do not have to > choose to compile in- or out- anything though. We are talking about Solaris, which is targeted for desktop and enterprise production use right? Do you honestly think that any sane company will install a compiler on their production server? or in fact let the SA tweak software installs at the last minute? If they do, they must have no standards or procedure or run by armatures. Disagree again. I maintain RPMs too > <http://www.postconf.com/software/> and the amount of time it > takes to build every architecture for every release is several > orders of magnitude greater than for simply tweaking a line or two > in a makefile. Once again, we are talking about Solaris here, we will not have so many different arch as you show on that web-page. With core 2 duo and other quad procs (intel and AMD) in the queue, why would anyone want to maintain packages for 32-bit, unless they want to support old hardware? I dont think many companies will still have hardware which supports only 32-bit kernel for Sparc. Plus with the latest "Victoria Falls" in the pipeline, why would anyone think about 32-bit kernel for sparc? Once again we need to focus on Desktop and Enterprise ready software and OS and not a hacker's or geek's desktop. Whether pkg, apt, yum is not at issue. If OpenSolaris adopts any > of these models it will not win them a fraction of a percent of > Linux or Unix mindshare. OTOH, if they adopt the BSD port model it > will immediately translate into a large market share of Unix, and > eventually into a large market share of Linux admins as well. Are you kidding me? Why do you think pkg-get was created on Solaris by SFW? it was to direclty compete with apt-get and yum. With source-code compilation at install time, how many SUN/Linux/AIX Admins are you going to retrain, forget that, think about how you will do the sales pitch to an enterprise to move to a model which allows un-signed, un-tested binaries on to their systems? Well, having maintained thousands of Sun and hundreds of BSD and > Linux servers I would guess that you haven't tried the ports > model. BTW, it is not exclusive. There's nothing in the BSD port > system that requires compilation. It works with binaries as well, > but the advantages to install-time compilation are numerous and > well documented. We have around 5000 Sun servers and 500+ Linux server in production, if this source code install model is presented to me, I would reject it in a heart beat -> no compilers allowed on production servers. All packages have to installed and tested in staging, before even people think about putting it on production. The reason for this is choice. If you give end-user a choice they will have fewer incentives to look at other distributions. The choice seems pretty straightforward from my perspective: 1) force a binary-only distribution on customers and gain no market share. Even SRPMS do not provide the options and ease of use of port-based packages. Or 2) offer a seamless source installation option and differentiate the OS as a superior option. This is good for a developer's desktop, not for normal desktop user or production server builds. -GGR
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