Wyllys Ingersoll wrote: > It is unreasonable to burden > the teams that want to bring FOSS code to Solaris to also put in additional > effort to fully "Solaris-ize" the code in question.
If the ARC adopts that position, I think that'll be a substantial change in direction. The stated policy up to this point was that "free software isn't free from cost," and that part of the burden of integrating into [Open]Solaris itself is that the software and/or documentation and/or packaging may well need to be modified in order to be compatible with the system. Doing this might mean engaging the upstream community, or applying diffs, or forking the source, or perhaps some combination of those approaches. I'd thought that this understanding is exactly what the whole "kitchen sink" scheme for random FOSS integration was based on. Has this changed? > If integrating into ON, > then the argument is stronger, but for SFW packages ideally we like > to just drop in the tarballs from the upstream community and apply a > minimal amount of changes to get it to compile and work. That's a darned shame. Compiling things and tossing them over the wall is fine for a "contrib" repository or something like the old /opt/sfw "Companion CD," but I don't see how it makes any sense for integrated software. Moreover, I don't see how consolidation matters here. Consolidations set build and integration rules, but from the user's point of view, it matters not whether "SUNWfoobar" was originally integrated via ON or some other consolidation. They're all the same to a user. Thus, the same quality had better be present, or the quality of the result will actually reflect the weakest part of the chain. If compile-without-changes is the intended new direction, why not just switch to Linux? It'll be way easier, and will have essentially similar results. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carlsonj at workingcode.com>
