On 13/11/2007, Paul Jakma <paul at clubi.ie> wrote: > On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, James Carlson wrote: > > > What we come back to is that a common and minimal "reference > > distribution," at least as you're describing, isn't what the rest > > of the proponents (notably Sun's marketing) want to have here. > > Instead, they want a single "known good" distribution that can be > > proposed for all first-time users. Ignoring that desire will, I > > think, set us up for future conflicts of exactly this nature. > > It seems the "good for reference distro" and "good for marketing > distro" are two seperate things. > > - One needs to be a reasonably complete distribution, for a wide > audience. > > - The other needs to be confined to the intersection of all^Wmost > OpenSolaris distributions. > > The smallest, useful source subset of OpenSolaris available today > would be OS/Net, no? The smallest, useful binary subset would be the > reduced networking cluster of ON. > > Is there a good reason to not use those as the initial reference, and > incrementally approve on them?
Having a reference distribution is one thing; having that reference distribution be used to ensure compatibility is another. With a reference distribution that is only used as a "minimal bootstrap reference", NOT for compatibility, it is probably fine to omit things such as a desktop environment, non-free components, etc. With a reference distribution that is used as a guide for compatibility, choosing a desktop, default libraries, etc. are all extremely important for ISVs, etc. As an independent developer, I want to be able to distribute binaries that I *know* will work because all of the dependencies will already exist on the system in a default installation. Anything that requires the user to download additional pieces before my app will run is unacceptable to me. That's the mess I have right now with GNU/Linux when I distribute binaries and I'll gladly turn my handy dandy flamethrower on anyone who suggests it should be the same way :) -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall
