Eric Boutilier wrote:
> On Tue, 8 May 2007, Joseph Kowalski wrote:
>> Eric Boutilier wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 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...
>>
>> And I'm not talking about add-on utilities for which the associated
>> OpenSolaris contributors are the ultimate maintainers. (Although I'm
>> not sure I agree with the examples.)
>
> Please explain. A discussion about examples such as these
> would probably be useful here.
I can see I've been very sloppy with my choice of words. "add-on utility"
is pretty darn vague.
I probably should have stopped with "utility". All I intended to infer with
"add-on" is that it was probably not present before on Solaris. It
turns out
as I think about it, this is irrelevant.
A couple of examples:
Adding the "human friendly" units to "df"
Adding ksh93
Note, that Roland is not the ultimate maintainer of ksh93, but he had to
do significant modification for maintain compatibility with the older
versions.
>> The key attribute isn't "add-on utility".
>> Its even a bad example on my part because it could easily be a
>> library or
>> other component. The key attribute is "ultimately maintained
>> elsewhere".
>
> Agreed, but I think there are actually two key things. Scope
> is the other one, and you said "everybody". No doubt you were
> using it rhetorically, but the thing is, I don't think it's
> even close to everybody.
Yea, its far from everybody. I'm not even sure its "most" or even
"a lot".
This issue is far from "sorted out", but its my belief that "integrating"
a new new utility which is ultimately maintained elsewhere adds little
value to the "source base" which is OpenSolaris. It may add a *huge*
amount of value to any and/or all OpenSolaris based distributions.
I'm just uncomfortable with the *way* this is being done. Saying they
are just another OpenSolaris source utility doesn't seem right when 99.44%
of any *source* changes should be made elsewhere. I need to
think a bit more about it and talk to a few people before I provide a
proposal to deal with this. Also, if anything comes from the discussion
here about a "Reference OpenSolaris Distribution" it may change the
terrain surrounding these choices.
- jek3
