Brian Gupta wrote: >> Common across what? Really, what is the scope? Even after reading the >> whole thread a couple of times I'm unsure whether you're trying to >> provide >> something for Solaris/SXCE specifically, a new distribution that doesn't >> exist yet, or trying to be all things to all distributions. > > Specifically to an "OpenSolaris Reference Distribution", which does > not exist yet. I've been thinking about something, and this seems like a good tidbit to bring it out.
My personal hope was the OpenSolaris would result in a much better set of bits for the code for which OpenSolaris community members are the primary maintainers. I'm not so thrilled by the on going exercise of everybody trying to "flesh out" the Solaris Product with additional utilities they feel add a lot of value, but are ultimately maintained elsewhere. These are both worthy goals, but I believe the second is a goal to be tackled by a "Distribution" (or distro). Until there is a "OpenSolaris Reference Distribution" _and its design point is well understood_, I'm not strongly motivated by this discussion. If that Distribution decides to be "Debian like", then this makes a lot of sense. If that Distribution decides to be more minimalistic, then this may not make a lot of sense. Yes, I *strongly* believe the OpenSolaris community should be discussing the the tools and mechanisms which would allow a Distribution to be easily constructed. That is a lot of what is being discussed. However, in the meantime I'm leary of the OpenSolaris community behaving as if it were a distro. In some sense Dennis has set himself up as a "layer on" distro of sorts. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Actually (I need to think about more), maybe Dennis is doing the exactly right thing, and the OpenSolaris community should be working on tools to make Dennis's life easier. Also, and this is critical, the OpenSolaris community should remember that there may be more than one "Dennis" in the world. The astute reader may note that this contradicts what I said in the past about it would be great if OpenSolaris set up some form of "apt-get" functionality. Now I'm not so sure. Its a *_great_* thing, but in the absence of a "Reference Distribution", I'm not sure it should be an OpenSolaris thing. Finally, so I don't paint with too broad a brush, there are some components that although ultimately maintained elsewhere are "core" enough to Solaris that we should ignore the fact they are ultimately maintained elsewhere. bind and sendmail are two classic examples of this. The recent addition of ksh93 probably also fits this discription. However, its my belief that this is the 10% case. Please note that I'm saying very little here about what should be done. I'm mostly commenting on the "who" and "where" issues. Also, please note that I'm not a "mouthpiece" for Sun on this. These are my own, "OpenSolaris Contributor" views. - jek3 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/sfwnv-discuss/attachments/20070507/8438ff0c/attachment.html>
