Hi all,
===============
Yesterday I spent a few hours at night thinking and talking with
friends about OpenSolaris and more specifically trying to answer the
question of "Why I don't use OpenSolaris on my personal laptop?".
I started to think about it because yesterday I saw Chris Hanna - the
new intern in my team - trying to compile Anjuta from early in the
morning till late... without success.
He tried to compile the whole thing first, but.. oops! it requires the
Perl Regular Expressions library, and it does not ship with Solaris,
so he had to start compiling it first. He had many of problems trying
to do it, but after a number of hours he sorted those problems out.
In the meanwhile, I thought: «I'm sure he would prefer to type
"apt-get install anjuta" rather than spending all that time trying to
compile just a dependency of what he really wants to use».
apt-get is the Debian program to install software. It manages to
install dependencies, to compile packages from the source just by
adding "-b" to the command line, to fetch software from repositories
all around the world, etc. It is a real pleasure to have this kind of
facility when you are working. It lets you focus on your target rather
than in sort out some compilation problems.
I'm used to having all those facilities available, and it is really
hard living without it after having used it for a while. It's like
travelling in a time machine: using Slackware back in 1995.
The proposal I'm about to expose tries to fill this huge usability
gap. It tries to bring all those facilities to the OpenSolaris world
in order to make Linux users feel at home when they switch to
OpenSolaris and, at the same time, drastically improve the new users
experience.
My proposal is to begin a new Debian architecture based on
OpenSolaris. Debian is more than a Linux distribution - it is a
collection of software you can use in different ways. The most common
Debian installation is Debian with Linux, but it is also possible to
install Debian with Hurd (the GNU kernel), Debian with FreeBSDand
Debian with NetBSD. (At the moment, lot of this work is still on
process, but anyway)
Debian with OpenSolaris might bring loads of software to the
OpenSolaris community. Currently the development branch of Debian
contains +17,000 ready to use packages. Only in the `main` section, it
is more than +8Gb of binary packages! Isn't it something that worth
the effort?
Volume matters, there is lot of value in volume. This proposal is
trying to create a new way for free software advocates to use
OpenSolaris in a friendly way, keeping all the functionality they
already have on Linux. Why should someone used to the wonderful dpkg
system with the Debian's huge repository switch to.. the pkg* utility?
Let's face it, we have to solve this problem.
As far as I know, there are some Gentoo guys who are trying to do
something similar. That is also a good approach.
I hope it might also have some positive side-effect to OpenSolaris:
* The Debian packages that won't currently build on OpenSolaris
will be identified and listed so that they can be ported to
OpenSolaris. As long as it is a Debian process, we can expect
some support from the community.
* Debian is a Free Software distribution, as OpenSolaris is a Free
Software kernel. There will be a really free OpenSolaris based
distribution people can use. One more time, we have to face it,
Free Software developers love freedom, and to depend on the
releases managed by a company that is worried about the end of
the next quarter, really doesn't fit for them.
* As long as it is Debian, the biggest part of the job is
done. The packages, the compilation mechanisms, the software
distribution, the system utilities to manage software, etc. We
just need to make OpenSolaris work with that base software.
* When the initial work ends, and if it gets upstream, we are
going to get a non-stop stream to updated software. As son as
Debian packages GNOME, the packages will be available for Debian
on OpenSolaris as well. Doesn't it sound grand?
Some more notes:
* Sun is currently a Debian partner, but I don't know what has
been the collaboration on the past.
* Approaches like SunFreeware or Blastwave are far far away from
being something like what I'm proposing. It is not the same
league; it is not even the same game. Sorry. :-)
===============
Permanent link:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/alvaro?entry=why_i_do_think_opensolaris
--
Greetings, alo.
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