Brian,
> I think that you need to remember that SXCE serves more than one
> purpose. One purpose is to serve as the base binary distribution
> system on which OpenSolaris development is based.
In another thread, though, it appears that Indiana is meant to replace
SXCE...
> This is required
> because not all of the consolidations have been open sourced yet,
> nor all of the code in the ones that have been open sourced. In
> this capacity, once Indiana is complete, this need will disappear.
But why would this stop Indiana from being released, presuming Indiana
some form of Sun blessed products? Given that the current SXCE contains
this proprietary code and it can be obtained for free, so could Indiana
contain this proprietary code and be obtained for free.
I don't see any technical or legal blockers to doing that unless Indiana
contains something that won't live with proprietary code (such as
something core that is GPLv?).
> But SXCE also serves as the beta test platform for the next release
> of Solaris. As long as Solaris is a separate distribution from
> Indiana that contains different bits, then the need for SXCE will
> continue to exist.
Does it? Herein lies the confusion.
Some with a sun.com address say that Indiana hasn't gone through the
significant tests to be a reference platform for a real Solaris. This is
true.
Some with a sun.com address say that at a conference and in discussions,
SXCE was going to go away in favour of Indiana. I think this is also true.
The above two propositions aren't contradictory, per se, but I think the
timeframe might go:
1. Solaris 11 is released as a product based on the current (well a
future version of the current) SXCE
2. Solaris 12 is released as a product based on Indiana
The other alternative, of course, is that SXCE continues and Indiana
continues. SXCE has the elder, more horrid packaging system and a large
corporate market share much like Redhat...hmmm...
So someone comes along and names a distribution after himself and
another woman. For argument's sake, let's call this person, "Ian" and
the other woman, "Diana". And we now have Redhat^WSolaris and
Debian^WIndian (there's a silent "a" in there, ok?).
Maybe, Indiana may be a more community distributed, 'net downloadable
friendly distribution of the OpenSolaris core, whilst Solaris will
continue to be an extraordinarily stable operating system that is a
distribution of the OpenSolaris core.
Perhaps we could substitute "The OpenSolaris Community OGB, policies and
rules" as "Linus Torvalds" or "The FreeBSD Committee" - that is a
governing body which makes sure that the OpenSolaris core does whatever
its communities want it to do (or not if you're in a community on the
wrong side of a compromise).
Who knows? Future will, I guess.
But until I have a reliable crystal ball, I think I'll still be a little
confused :)
DSL
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