On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, Philip Brown wrote: > What I see happening currently, is that a group of sun employees are > making their own vision of what a packaging system should look like, and > then using their considerable internal sun influence to make it "the new > 'community' packaging standard", by means of their control over what > ships in Indiana.
I partially agree, but I know that the folks that did work on the packaging were very short on resource, and worked their @$$ off, to get this completed. It is not as if this was without thought, consideration, or careful planning to try and fit into the Solaris world as it would in the OpenSolaris world. This is true for most all of development these days. So far I have seen nothing in regards to the implementation, just about the process. I am afraid even Sun folks know the process as it is today is not complete and will not work over the long term. They are trying to change that. > Completely bypassing ARC, or any *community* based *process* to determine > what the requirements are, and what the implementation looks like. Hmmm...I do not know the details on the ARC cases, but I would have imagined that this would have gone through ARC at some point, so I am not sure if your comments are substantiated or not. Either way, this packaging system has surfaced quite quickly, and I don't think it would have been possible to get it done if the engineers would have let the community pontificate on every aspect of how the packaging system would work in the future, IOW, at some point someone needs to make some decisions and in this case they made them, for better or worse, I happen to feel it's a big improvement to the existing packaging and can support us into the future. > Yes, they take "feedback" to some degree, but they have completely > bypassed any kind of proper ARC review of what they are doing. And the > overall Sun attitude seems to be, "that's just fine; Indiana is a sun > product, so the sun people driving it, can do whatever they like. > They're sun employees, so we 'trust them'". I wouldn't characterize it like that, but beat on Sun if you like. > This is about as anti-community as you can get. Example: If IPS was led, > and written, by non-sun employees, this would not be happening. I doubt we would have got a comprehensive packaging system in the short order of time it was developed in. I don't expect the community to get the information and knowledge under their belt too quickly, and I see a lot of "Sun won't let us participate, they do what they want, they don't want to play with us". This is all just a big waste of time, because the engineers working on Solaris keep doing that every day, and the people whining in the community keep doing that also, most every day... > However, when it comes to OpenSolaris AS A WHOLE, it seems inappropriate to > me, to have the packaging methods for any and all opensolaris distributions, > to be dictatated by a set of unilaterally Sun-made choices. Not so cut and dry to me. For instance, any distribution will be able to take these packages, and they can form a base to the various distirbutions, but I see as much of a lack of participation in the community as you point to with Sun. Blastwave, Nexenta, Belenix, Schilix, whichever ones...I don't see any consolidation being formed to have these folks work together anyway. If Sun was to consult each one of these folks, not only would it take that much longer, it wouldn't be done today, or at least to the level that it is. > If that's the case, I guess we, the solaris community, can stop > bothering to pay attention to the public ARC stuff, and just wait and > see whatever ships in Indiana, as "what we need to follow". Well, I think one thing you could do is stop being smarky, and think rationally, rather than tossing off a wet diaper to Sun. I would like to know what is wrong with the IPS packaging system that you and others feel the need to throw an open-tantrum? Have you actually looked at the packaging system? Have you found some limitation on the implementation? Being smarky doesn't usually get things done. I have seen nobody say anything about what is wrong, just about the process and how it was done. I agree the current process sucks, and it is certainly being looked at. > If someone develops their own packaging system, it will of course initially > only be used by "a subset of the community". > The longer-term view, is to wait and see whether that "subset", eventually > becomes "the majority of the community", by the community itself choosing > whether or not to use it. > > If it is a better solution, that will happen. If it is not, then it will > wither of its own accord. If you think you can come up with a better solution, please implement it. You know what Sun is going to do, and I suspect that Sun will be working with other community members to populate a repository of open source software, so whatever packaging you come up with, you can base it on IPS which is known at this point that Sun will use. If you see faults in the new packaging system, by all means offer your feedback. Feel free to implement something on top of it, that is what open source is all about. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group
