Hi, This question occured to me while catching up with the YetAnotherDistro/Indiana/OpenSolaris-distro dicsussion: why use a separate distribution as a delivery vehicle for a new userland toolset and not instead develop branded zones within existing distributions?
As far as I can tell the various distributions have near identical kernel components. Where one might add a particular driver that is something that would be nice to contribute back to the common source base where possible, or to distribute as binary packages applicable to all distributions otherwise. The real flavour of each distribution seems to be derived from the mix of applications it has selected at user level - what flavour of tar you get, Xsun vs Xorg, things in /opt/sfw vs /usr/bin or /usr/sfw, all GNU tools etc, installer, packaging, etc. All of that can, I imagine, be delivered in a various predefined branded zones: if the user wants a GNU tool feel then they instantiate a GNU flavour zone using some delivered recipe to do so, etc. The global zone continues to run the base distribution, and we can maintain all the compatability and predictabilty we like there. Additional zones are nearly free in terms of system resources (way cheaper than say a separate domain over some hypervisor) so we can get multiple OpenSolaris-based personalities all within the same system cheaply. I suspect the main challenges to that approach are the packaging model (being revisted anyway?) and associated patching/upgrade (certainly being visted again now). New zones management tools may help, too. But I see those combined as a whole lot less effort than myriad distributions. Gavin _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
