On Jan 22, 2008 10:12 AM, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at sun.com> wrote:
> Shawn Walker wrote:
> > The Distribution Community Group should be the central place for
> > discussions and decisions regarding OpenSolaris-based distributions
> > and their impact upon the OpenSolaris community. To support this, it
> > is proposed that the OGB will allow the group to act as the initial
> > arbiter in dispute resolution amongst distributions and related
> > projects.
>
> So this community group would be about building common technology and
> not about managing the individual distributions? That doesn't seem
> to match with this:
I apologise if I came across as implying that. However, that is not my
intention.
The intent is that individual distributions be *encouraged* to use
common technology to discourage fragmentation.
However, individual distributions are certainly free to go their own
direction, as I see it.
It is definitely about "managing" distribution projects.
> > Distributions
> > that have previously been sponsored by another Community Group may
> > remain with that group. However, it is hoped that all such projects
> > will approach the contributors of this new community to seek
> > reassignment (sponsorship), or that if necessary, they be reassigned.
>
> One community group in charge of all distributions seems too broad.
> For making the decisions about the distro itself, like each distro's
> release plans, it would seem a separate community group is necessary
> - for example, why would Ian have a vote on Schillix release plans or
> Joerg a vote on Indiana release plans?
That is not the way I understand Projects and Community Groups to work.
As I understand it, the Community Group sponsors and manages projects
at a high level, but project-level decisions are made by the members
of each project.
It is not my intent to create a Community Group that would vote on an
individual (such as SchilliX) distribution's release plans.
It is my intent for distributions, like SchilliX, to be a project
sponsored by the Distribution Community Group and the members of that
project would decide their own release plans.
The sponsoring Community Group would merely help them coordinate their
efforts and ensure that they maintain a healthy relationship with the
OpenSolaris Community.
> With the planned distro constructor technology, I could see a community
> covering a family of related distros, which all release on the same
> schedule, but just package a different subset of the packages from the
> same repository - for instance an Indiana community group that managed
> [names made up on the spot purely for example purposes] "OpenSolaris.org:
> The Reference Distro", "OpenSolaris.edu: The Academic Distro", and
> "OpenSolaris.EU: The KDE Distro", makes sense - but folding in Schillix
> or Nexenta to that group does not unless they plan to just become variants
> of Indiana ("OpenSolaris.GNU: The Nexenta Distro"?).
It is not my desire to see distributions "segregated"; all of these
Distributions have one very important things in common -- they are
based on OpenSolaris technology.
I think it is entirely possible for Distributions that do not use the
same tools to co-exist together.
In the end, I believe it is up to the leaders of each Distribution
Project and the Community Group as a whole to work this out.
I believe it is possible.
Thanks for your feedback,
--
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
"To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." -
Robert Orben
