David Halko <davidha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If there was failure, it was with OpenSolaris programmers being too
> aggressive, and the rest of us inheriting the mess.
I would call me an "OpenSolaris programmer", are you talkig about the people
that have been employed by Sun?
In 2003, I developed a concept for a Solaris Live CD and discussed that with
Sun. In 2004 and 2005, I developed a concept for an alternative Solaris Distro
that was intended to be 100% free. I also tried to start a common project with
Sun to implement the latter idea.
Sun instead hired Ian Murdock who dod take most of my ideas but he also added
some things that caused the project to fail:
- He claimed that there was no Solaris community and tried to create one.
This way, he caused a significant damage on the existing Solaris
community.
- He believed that people are interested in a Solaris that looks like
Linux. Well, he did not ask the Solaris community.
This way, he caused further disinterest from the Solaris community.
I tried to warn, but too few people did help me arguing.
> Core OS functionality (booting, services, packaging, etc.) should not be
> dependent upon newer GNU userland, but based upon thoroughly debugged
> Solaris userland. These binaries should be separate and distinct
> locations (perhaps: /bin, /sbin, etc.) for simple maintenance and to enable
> easy embedding into smaller form-factors.
Agreed for the userland!
What do you mean by "distinct locations" in this relation?
> If people wish to have a newer userland, where bugs are constantly being
> thrashed out, from other developers in other spheres (not interested in
> Solaris longevity) - then those should be put elsewhere and people should
> have the option to pick & choose (perhaps: /usr/bin, /usr/sbin,
> /usr/gnu/bin, /usr/fbsd, etc.) and those communities inherit the bugs those
> userlands suffer from. The core should be wary of suffering from external
> bugs that others may not approve fixes for or suffering from feature
> suppression where others may block innovation regarding.
We, the Solaris community need to find people who are interested and able to
work on the UNIX userland. I am doing this since a while, but Sun disregarded
the userland (another mistake from Sun...).
If you look at the software I maintain and distrinbute, you will see that there
is a lot of enhanced UNIX software inside already. What we need to take care of
is to keep the UNIX philosophy in mind and not to be a blind Linux follower.
> Sun and Oracle, in OpenSolaris and Solaris 11, merged the standards-base
> and gnu-base userlands together without strict differentiation,
> contaminating the core OS services, which was perhaps the poorest
> engineering decision I have ever seen. I would hope others do not make the
> same mistake.
Schillix does not make that mistake ;-)
> The purpose of an OS is to run software - if existing commercial software
> will not run under the OpenSolaris splinter, there may be little reason for
> the splinter to exist, with the exception of some special purpose
> appliance. The usefulness of a special-purpose appliance running with an
> OpenSolaris kernel without USB3, WiFi, or clustered-ZFS support is puzzling
> to me... unless it is embedded - and then modernized userland becomes less
> important.
We need to work on USB3 of course and we need to work on Wifi (e.g. to
implement support for "eduroam").
> Clearly, Illumos is driving OpenSolaris source code towards storage
> appliance and cloud-based hypervisor. Few in those groups understand the
> necessity of clustered ZFS for storage to provide good any-to-any H-A or
> D-R... this tells me those projects may not be long-for-this-world.
Illumos completely ignores general software quality. I cannot speak for their
ZFS enhancements (as I did not look at them) but for the rest most of the
changes are not acceptable by me.
> I guess the rest of us need to decide what WE WANT out of an OpenSolaris
> splinter.
We need a general purpose OpenSolaris continuation that is not dominated by
companies.
Jörg
--
EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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