On Mon, 7 May 2007, Joseph Kowalski wrote: > 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.
Wait though. There are lots of OpenSolaris contributors who are focused on add-on utilities and doing it here, not elsewhere. SFW/CCD for one and pkgbuild/SFE for another... > 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. It is critical, but the actions, perspectives, I've seen taking place in the OpenSolaris Community for a long time lead me to believe there's no reason for concern. > 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. No argument here. I think we (the OpenSolaris Community) should have started working on a reference distribution a long time ago. Eric > 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 > >
