[Please redirect this thread to the trademark-policy-dev alias] Paul Jakma wrote: > The smallest, useful source subset of OpenSolaris available today would > be OS/Net, no? The smallest, useful binary subset would be the reduced > networking cluster of ON. > > Is there a good reason to not use those as the initial reference, and > incrementally approve on them?
I think that Jim (and a slew of others) touched on it - the reference definition probably fails miserably as a usefully complete distro. Consider the world of yesteryear, when the OpenLook GUI desktop called OpenWindows was being EOL'd in favor of this new thing called CDE. We (ARCs...) had to figure out what parts of the desktop suite were removable and which had to stay; we couldn't remove anything that a deployed ISV app might be using. We ended up with a handful of libs that needed to stay, but the majority of the apps (mailtool, filemgr...), include files and man pages could go poof. Back to this discussion, the "libs" are representative of the stuff a "reference specification" would require, while the other stuff would make up the special sauce that a worthwhile distro would need to add. By postulating a network repository where one could go and get missing dependencies, I think we can get away from requiring that the reference spec include more than a minimal core. At least I hope so, since I don't know how to resolve the "either GNOME or KDE" debate :-) -John
