Hi, people.
We all liked Solaris, but its fate to become new HP/UX was evident from
day 1, when Oracle cancelled OpenSolaris.
There's nothing to discuss here, it was evident that it'll become some
OS which nobody has never seen sooner or later
(just try to search for Solaris administrator job on LinkedIn and
compare to Linux administrator job offers).
But this list is not about Solaris.
Let's look at consequences.
1) We are loosing the great source of upstream fixes for a broad range
of software. On itself it's not catastrophic, but in areas where it was
the only source, it is
(read, desktop illumos will die rather sooner then later). Fortunately,
we were successful in incorporating our changes in Mate and
Enlightenment, but it's not full
story (for example, try to build and use polkit on illumos...). I hoped
there were enough interested parties to support server software on
illumos/Solaris systems,
but there are issues even in this area. We can look at MongoDB decision
here, which was not surprising. Now suppose if PostgreSQL devs do the
same. So, we need upstreaming
our patches everywhere where it's possible. We (devs and users) need to
communicate to upstream projects, so that they don't forget about our
existence.
2) Another underestimated issue is lack of documentation. Our (or
SmartOS, or OmniOS) documentation is nothing compared to the Oracle
Solaris documentation library. Sometimes
it's very unevident how to configure some subsystems (for example,
configure FMA to send events about failed services via email). We (whole
illumos community) have no documentation team, and this is an issue.
Compare OI 'Handbook' to FreeBSD one to see the difference. We have
infrastructure for creating documentation
(https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-docs/), but it has just about 20
commits for the whole 2017 year. And most of this documentation discuss
beginners topics, which are not of great interest to system
administrator, who tries to solve exact problem. This leads people to
look at code as on only exact source of documentation, and this is
unacceptable. This is the area where usual users could help.
3) We all speak that Oracle didn't support Solaris in Universities, but
what did illumos community to support illumos distributions there? For
example, FreeBSD has repository https://github.com/teachbsd/course with
materials for Cambridge FreeBSD course. Do we have a single man who
tried to teach OS basics on base of some illumos distribution or to make
it easier for others to do?
Another (not directly related issues):
4) We efficiently have no translations to other languages (where we have
translations, they come from upstream projects).
5) After OmniTI exiting illumos family, we efficiently have no entity,
providing commercial support for general purpose solarish OS.
To Adam:
6) Please, don't forget to create our mirror of Solaris-related Oracle
github repositories ;)
Perhaps, instead of discussing sad but expected event, we could start
solving our own problems?
---
System Administrator of Southern Federal University Computer Center
_______________________________________________
openindiana-discuss mailing list
openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org
https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
