Mike Gerdts writes:
> 1. There will likely always be some encumbered stuff.  But "it's so
> ugly it will turn you to stone" shouldn't be a sufficient reason to
> keep it closed.  Arguably, this is even more of a reason to have it
> opened.

I've had my psyche scarred by looking at pdo.c, but I do agree with
you that terminal ugliness is an insufficient reason to avoid opening
it.  I don't think Dave was actually suggesting it was.

> I don't raise this issue expecting there will a fix for anything I
> complain about today.  I raise it so that sometime over the next 2 - 5
> years things maybe get better with input from Sun's customers that are
> also contributors to OpenSolaris.

The one key reason I can see to avoid plowing in the time and effort
to open this bit of source is that it simply has nothing to do with
OpenSolaris.  There are no "Nevada patches," so it plays no role in
the system.  Moreover, none of the OpenSolaris future development
appears to be headed towards a place where this has any relevance.

If someone can build some consensus here that folks will want to build
an independent Solaris-like distribution, including the same type of
hand-crafted patches that Sun generates, then that's a good motivation
to work on releasing these bits.

In other words, we've got lots of stuff that still needs to be placed
in the open, and I'm not sure this should be all that high on the
list.

I can understand that some Solaris 10 customers may want to find their
way into self-support of S10 by way of the not-quite-entirely-
different Nevada sources, but I'm much less clear on whether that's
actually a goal of the overall OpenSolaris effort.  As with the
ugliness argument, and given the OpenSolaris context on this mailing
list, that doesn't sound like good reason to work on releasing it.

The release of code intended merely for S10 support sounds like
something that may be reasonable for a discussion with Sun's support
group, rather than in the OpenSolaris Install community.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677

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