Hello all.
Some time ago there was a discussion about having a mechanism of easy
automatic installation of new software on OpenSolaris from a central
repository, in a manner similar to, say, apt-get in Debian.
There is already a project called NexentaOS, which is effectively a
Debian GNU/OpenSolaris port: Debian GNU mechanisms and instruments on
top of OpenSolaris kernel. There is also a project called
Gentoo/OpenSolaris, which is aimed at the same goal, but using Gentoo
mechanisms and instruments on top of OpenSolaris kernel.
I appreciate and respect work done by these projects very much and I
think that these projects are good at having more Linux fans looking and
coming to OpenSolaris. But I also think that OpenSolaris itself (as the
OS) also should have a nice package update and installation mechanism,
coupled together with a powerful and software-rich central repository.
But OpenSolaris should still stay OpenSolaris, so it should do it in its
own way, not Debian or Gentoo way.
So what I propose?
1. Having a central repo of precompiled binary packages which can be
easily be downloaded and installed by something like pkg_get & pkg_add.
As I understand, this is what is already being done.
2. In addition to packages, my idea is to have a tree of /usr/ports on
OpenSolaris, like we have on FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, with links to
places where an user can automatically download, patch for clean compile
on OpenSolaris, build, verify and install any piece of open-source
software that can be adopted, ported or patched to work on OpenSolaris.
By just typing 'make install' in the /usr/ports/subdir_of_needed_software.
This would add more flexibility and allow us to easily port and use new
software, and update it more often than binary packages usually allow
to. That's what we see on FreeBSD.
And also, it won't make OpenSolaris just "another flavor of BSD", like
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and NexentaOS are just "another flavors of Debian".
The /usr/ports seems to me a much more architecturally "true Unix" way
to install software on OpenSolaris than, say, adopting yum or apt-get to
the mainline OpenSolaris distribution :))
With best regards,
Roman Bekker.
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