On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Glynn Foster <Glynn.Foster at sun.com> wrote: > > On 2/03/2009, at 2:35 PM, Martin Bochnig wrote: >> >> I simply think that questions like IPS vs. conary or Gnome vs. KDE >> should be solved via a referendum. >> For what else do we actually have a constitution, otherwise? >> (In case of conary facts have been created by SMI, so by now it is of >> course much too late for such a poll.) > > You can't have a set of technical decisions made by a referendum. Lots of > people without a strong vested interest in the code would essentially be > arbitrarily voting on what the 'perceived' best solution is, without any > strong personal research on it.
Sorry Glynn, but this is always the case. Especially in real national politics. Folks will always elect what or whom their favorite TV station instructs them to (and most folks lack any halfway sophisticated political background). Do you then see this as sufficient to abandon democracy? > There's very few open source communities out > there that would do such a thing. I am also on a few other devel lists (e.g. qemu, xorg). While there aren't actual referenda there, those discussions are indeed happening (openly / unbiased-ly). > Quite often, developers gather around > something that they find most interesting, and momentum gathers from there. > It just so happened that more developers found disadvantages of conary > versus writing IPS from scratch. Really? Where can I find that specific discussion somewhere in the archives? AT LEAST NOT IN PUBLIC. Maybe you have more knowledge than I, simply because you know how it looks on the other side of the firewall. Somebody inside SMI had made this decision "for" the community. Namely in advance (circa summer 2007). Period and end. Also, I heard it so often, that conary was so different and had so many disadvantages (and would therefore simply not be the right choice for OpenSolaris). This argument - as is - always gets fired back to me. Could you be a little more specific please? What exactly makes conary a bad choice? And if it is really so different from what OpenSolaris needs, why is IPS cloning its functionality? Why is it even implemented in the similar framework (python2.4 cli front-end, shared C libs backend, sqlite3 database [and stubs for other db's] repo management)? IPS is a conary-clone. Without the ability to build packages from src. Don't you believe me, if so, why _exactly_? So, Sun's default argument that conary would not be what OpenSolaris needs, cannot be valid, because in that case why would you be cloning it from scratch, in a huge effort? > If developers with runs on the board in > terms of contribution, trust and experience had gathered around conary, then > things might have been different. It was due to my - then - very poor style of interacting with the community and Sun. But what counts more, the best technical intentions and resulting benefits for our overall project, or some social problems due to untalented behavior, misunderstandings and misinterpretations? > Sorry, but that's the way open source generally works - entirely > meritocratic. Sorry, but I believe more in idealism, than in pragmatism. %martin
