Roy T. Fielding writes: > As an "outsider", my perspective was that the notion of consolidation > and the products grouped into consolidations were both completely > arbitrary accidents of business reorganizations within Sun. Even
This isn't exactly intended to be true. Yes, I'd certainly agree that there's a lot of fossilized politics in this area, but there's also some very important architectural considerations. A consolidation is a set of software that is all built and managed as a unit. It's not a group of "products." (In fact, a product is made of one or more consolidations, not the reverse.) Because it's built and managed as a whole, the individual components in the consolidation (the binaries it delivers) are able to share certain undocumented interfaces (called "Consolidation Private") without requiring special coordination. It's expected that each consolidation polices the use of those interfaces in an appropriate way. It's an important part of architectural review. The consolidation is also the important boundary for gatekeeping and issues about style and consistency. > AFAICT, consolidation just means a release management process for a > given set of products. In my opinion, that should be a project of the No. > If OpenSolaris were producing a distribution, then I'd suggest a > single consolidation structure along the lines of Ubuntu Linux. Now *that* would be horrible. Please, no. ON is far too big as it is and contains things (such as shells) that it should not. We do not want it to be bigger. > In other words, a distribution community that is responsible for > overlapping "release" projects that terminate every six months. > Then the individual product releases (managed by each product's > community) would be independent from the overall release project. > But, YMMV. I think release management is an important enough issue that it ought to be dealt with in an OpenSolaris-wide manner. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
