Alan Coopersmith writes: > 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?
Actually, I think we'll need to get to that point, at least in some cases. It seems impractical to me to say that the release binding and schedule in use for something as big as ON is just "whatever." It needs to be something that the consumers of ON (that is, the distributors) agree on. If they can't all agree on one setting, then they'll need to fork ON into separate streams to contain various kinds of content, because there will inevitably be world-changing features (such as SMF in the past) that can integrate into a release of one binding, but not another. If you could make everyone happy, you wouldn't need more than one distribution. :-/ The implication of separate release streams is essentially a tax on all project teams throughout OpenSolaris. You either design and develop using just one of those streams -- cutting off some users from using your project -- or you fork your project to match -- multiplying your own effort. You can devolve ON into a set of lots of tiny projects, each with its own release schedule and binding, but that doesn't actually change the problem: the bindings (the "changes") accepted by each distributor may well be different. If there's no common agreement across distributions, then compatibility and the ability for project teams to rely on an orderly progression and availability of features suffers. -- 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
