Shawn Walker wrote:
> Dennis Clarke wrote:
>
>> The orignal intent, the message and the soul of OpenSolaris way back
>> in the days of the pilot group and even before, was to have a
>> community which operates and feels like an open source group. With
>> input and valuable contributions being *possible* from a world of
>> people. With ease. A lot of people outside of the OpenSolaris
>> operation feel we have missed the target.
>>
>
> Projects/communities like docs, sfw, sfe, pkg and others are very easy
> to contribute to and have a very low barrier to entry.
>
> Last year, I found the pkg project, and I can tell you right now that it
> felt like and still feels very much like an open source project.
> Patches go to the mailing list, discussions happen there, and all the
> bug tracking is done on defect.opensolaris.org.
>
> There are many great community groups and projects to contribute to with
> relative ease for those that are truly interested...
>
> As far as I'm aware, the only project that is onerous to contribute to
> is ON. As you might have noticed, ON finally transitioned to Mercurial,
> and direct, external commits are coming soon (if not already here for a
> limited number of individuals?).
>
> Sure, there's still quite a few things that need to happen, but I'd say
> "we're on the road to victory."
>
ON commits are still, AFAICT, internal only. This is because the
repository still lives inside the SWAN firewall, so you need to have
internal access to Sun's network. (The RTI tools involved are also
still Sun-internal only.)
That said, its fairly easy for someone internal to take a changeset from
an external contributor and integrate it. The "onerous" parts of the
process for integration (test, SCA/CDDL verification, ARC approval if
appropriate) still apply, and I don't see *those* portions of the
problem going away anytime soon. (I don't think anyone seriously wants
them to -- the various sanity checks play an important role in assuring
the quality of the Solaris product is not compromised.)
-- Garrett
