Hello Glynn, Ian and others, I am not active on this list, but I started following your thread this weekend because I'm really intrigued by the Indiana project. My first experience with OpenSolaris was on Nexenta, which is a quite nice distribution.
Since Indiana is aimed at attracting the Linux community, ie me, I would like to share my point of view. On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 10:41:52AM +1200, Glynn Foster wrote: > A 6 monthly time based release schedule will focus energies in producing > a single CD install, and putting OpenSolaris on a path to being a > distribution as well as a source base. With a focus on the user > experience, > it is hoped that with wide distribution, the OpenSolaris ecosystem will > grow, providing valuable feedback to the project. 1. 6 month is WAY too short in my opinion. There is nothing more painfull than upgrading Fedora core 1 to 6 or Ubuntu abc to xyz while dist-upgrading 3-4 releases. Update process *should not* take more than 3 hours. I understand this is may be impossible with customized/compiled softwares, but a base system should update really quickly. I don't want a desktop with the lastest Gnome version, I want a stable Solaris derived OS. 2. Package management is important. I know that Ian already pointed that as a priority. This point is tightly related to the first one. Debian is one of my favorite, if not my favorite Linux distribution out there. I don't want to start a flamewar between dpkg/rpm/pkg/ebuilds. They all have their strenghts and weeknesses. What makes Debian the best distribution in package management is the strict policy that forces developpers to keep consistancy between different packages and the quality of the provided packages. Keep it with SRV4 packaging, I don't care. But 'pkg-get' and 'pkg-get dist-upgrade' should be a priority. 3. There is currently a thread about changing some default feature, ie bash backspace... I don't care neither. I have the impression that some people think that "oh he's from the Linux world, he must be retarded". Well, I don't care neither if it's bash, tcsh or whatever. I'll simply change it if I don't like it. What I want to point here, is that you are wasting times with minor details! I'm impatient to work with Dtrace/ZFS/SMF and other technologies, but currently Solaris doesn't provide, for me, enough 'manageability'. I simply don't have time to upgrade ~100 servers manualy. PS: Ian, if you do the same job you did with Debian, trust me I'll give a try to OpenSolaris :) -- Francois Saint-Jacques http://www.networkdump.com
