On 04/06/07, Brian Gupta <brian.gupta at gmail.com> wrote: > On 6/3/07, Richard Elling < Richard.Elling at sun.com> wrote: > > As for "only allowed development platform," I've never known those words > > to have any affect on a developer, except in Redmond ;-). > > Well, I was told that to contribute to NV, I had to be running on SXCE > latest minus 2 or better.
That's more of a technical matter than anything. If you want to integrate your changes into the Nevada project, it only makes sense that you use a reasonable up to date codebase that matches theirs. > > > 3) Current HW requirements are a bit on the high end. I can't run this > > > on an old 386, or for that matter on an old P/PII I have lying around. > > > And the thought is that Sun wouldn't include such projects in it's > > > Solaris distribution, for ecconomic and support reasons. Ideally Solaris > > > should be able to run on a 386 w/ 4MB of RAM (High end I know) > > > Realistically let's call the target i486DX, 8MB RAM, and 200MB HD. The > > > community can determine the supported hardware list. > > > > Stop global warming! Stop running old, weak, power-hungry computers! :-) > > If you are comparing CPUPower/Watt you are correct. From a chassis/watt > perspective, many older computers had much lower power profiles. If someone wants to do that project on their own, that's great. However, for a community as a whole, that's probably a waste of resources and time. Our time is better spent on hardware from the last couple of years and new hardware as it is released. Remember that support for all of this hardware has to be maintained and every bit that you add support for is an increase in cost of project size, documentation, maintenance, engineering, testing and so forth. That's one of the reasons why Debian dropped the number of supported architectures. They still allow contributions, but they don't focus on them. > > I don't think you're seeing opposition to a new distro. I think you're > > seeing a recognition that yet-another-distro doesn't necessarily solve > > the long-term problem of building the best platform for innovation. > > Can you elaborate what you mean by this? (best platform for innovation). I think it goes along with the saying of "don't throw the baby out with the bath water." The assumption so far has been that a completely new distro is needed to solve problems without proving that first. Instead of trying to focus on user experience and address challenges in the currently available distributions, it seems there has been an assumption that only a new distro can solve whatever problems there are. -- "Less is only more where more is no good." --Frank Lloyd Wright Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
