I'm both a user of blastwave and another Sun engineer cycle-stealing on this project. From my point of view, what I'd like to see happen with a community software distribution for Solaris Nevada is:
1) large scale participation of OpenSolaris developers/users. 2) automatic installation of required software dependencies 3) compilation on recent enough Solaris version that modern features can be enabled. Eg mplayer can use XVideo, SSE, SMF, etc; where appropriate, amd64 bit versions, etc. 4) No duplication/replacement of libraries already present in the target Solaris release. The last comment may need some elaboration.... Over time, software sediments. As more people use a particular library or utility, the need for that software to be included as a normally installed part of Solaris increases. This means that OpenSolaris may well accrete various commands and libraries that were part of the companion software in previous releases. This is necessary for other parts of OpenSolaris to build on top of those commands and libraries, and is a natural part of software evolution. Right now, Solaris's package management tools don't really provide a good way of expressing this sort of dependency, so one ends up defining different packages for different Solaris releases. Actually, recompilation tends to be a good idea anyway as various functions from BSD & Linux have found there way into Solaris over the last 6 years and one might as well use the internal version rather than the replacement or make-do version often included in various OSS for portability reasons. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.sun.com/barts _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
