Some freeware packages will build successfully on Solaris with little or no changes (kudos to their developers who went to some extra effort to achieve either portability or multi-os customization). Others, for which there may be no viable alternative on Solaris, do not.
Some coordination of porting efforts and feedback to project leaders might improve this situation considerably. From both a practicality and a PR standpoint, OpenSolaris should help make this more achievable. For the former, source adds to the capability for troubleshooting, driver development, etc. For the latter, those who have an ideological problem with spending their time porting their apps to non-open-source OSs have (at least sometimes) been answered. For those that don't require special hardware (i.e. the first of the three I list below), some access to any development/build farm would be great, so that some (such as the project developers) wouldn't necessarily need to set up their own Solaris system. Zones on the publicly available development system could make this fairly painless; perhaps the setup of a clean zone could be automated such that one could be created on request, and (given sufficient resources) kept in place as long as the developers/porters provided regular progress reports. When they were done, they could tar up any files they might need to pick up where they left off on some future update, and the zone and contents could be deleted to make room for the next project. Let me throw out a few examples that I think should be feasible, if a bit difficult; the latter two (of which the first is a prerequisite for at least one) are items I know I'd like to have, but they're beyond my present expertise and available time. * wxpython (not enough configuration hooks, for starters) * bitpim [cell phone upload/download software] (would require Solaris 9+libusb and ugen, or Solaris 10 or later, even for usb-only functionality; for serial functionality, would require the equivalent of the Linux cdc-acm driver. Probably needs configuration work too.) * tilp [TI calculator upload/download software] (presently stuck on compilation problems with libticables component; who knows what other problems may crop up) Comments? Ideas on how or where to coordinate apps of sufficient interest, sign up porters, involve project developers, etc? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
