Ian Collins wrote:
Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
Here's how I interpret all of this: I think they're shifting some
percentage of developers from opensolaris to solaris. Instead of
letting
opensolaris lead the way, and "trickle down" with open source
contributions
to solaris ... Solaris will lead the way, and contributions will trickle
down to opensolaris, sometimes closed source.
It's rather difficult for stuff to trickle up hill. OpenSolaris is a
long way ahead of Solaris and things will continue that way at least
until Solaris Next.
More likely the OS development will remain as is and it will be the
value add features that will be closed.
As I'm not on the Solaris/OpenSolaris team, I can't say for certain, but
as someone who has worked in the Hotspot VM group of Java now for 6
years (I'm the Hotspot buildmaster), and longer in large development
projects, let me say that new features ALWAYS appear in the development
branch first, THEN are backported to the older "stable" releases as time
and demand occurs. No one does new original development work on a
stable release. In rare cases, you can't actually do a backport, and
have to do a re-implementation, but even then, you try out the
feature/fix in the development train first to see how it performs.
Now, Oracle may chose to have these new features made publicly available
in the OpenSolaris repos, or they may consider them Value Add and not
release them, but I'm 99.99% sure the actual development work is being
done against the OpenSolaris codebase, not the Solaris 10 codebase.
For example: over here in Java VM land, all work goes into the JDK 7
Hotspot VM. Previously, we backported work from the 7 VM into a
separate codebase which was the JDK 6 VM. We've even given up that
model completely, and nowadays we simply codefreeze a given 7 VM
version, plop it into a 6 JDK, do testing/bugfixes, and ship it as part
of a 6Update release. So, in essence, we ship a stabilized development
VM as part of the stable 6Update JDK release train. Now, this isn't
possible in Solaris/OpenSolaris (I can't imagine anyone shipping the
OpenSolaris kernel in a Solaris Update), but the philosophy has to be
the same: new work into the development train, backporting into the
stable train as Marketing and Support tell you that specific fixes are
Important.
Note that certain features (COMSTAR for one) aren't showing up in
Solaris 10. That's because the amount of work to do the backport is
very high - indeed, I'm not even sure it's possible in many cases, even
if the resources were available.
What I'm really waiting for (and I'm sure the Solaris Team is, too) is
for Official Word as to when Solaris Next will actually emerge. That
is, is Oracle targeting a 2010 release date for Solaris Next? Or a
2011? Or later? I can imagine this isn't going to be forthcoming
anytime soon, as that's a huge decision.
But the good news is: Development efforts and valuable contributions
continue for both. Hopefully they'll start by taking all the ways
opensolaris is more advanced than solaris ... and incorporate them into
solaris.
Hasn't that always been the plan? Solaris Next will be based on
OpenSolaris.
Yes. Solaris Next = OpenSolaris codebase + stabilization work + some
Value Add proprietary stuff
Exactly how much of the later there will be is anyone's guess at this
point. And, once again, Solaris Next may not externally look like any
given release OpenSolaris, but under the hood, it will show a extremely
strong relationship.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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