On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 10:15:19AM -0700, Sriram Natarajan wrote: > Some how, I find the argument 'lawyers don't allow us to ship" not very > compelling considering most of the linux distributors have successfully > distributed vim for so long. How we are different ? , Even after so many > posts, this discussion will die soon (as before) and without shipping > basic productivity tools for a programmer like a programmer friendly > editor (e.g vim or emacs).
There are a number of technical and bureaucratic challenges to solving this problem. To make sense of them, you have to go back and read the Charter and Constitution, and understand how both the development process and exception handling are supposed to work. I will add that what follows is my interpretation of the issues; other OGB members may believe differently (as always). The Constitutional exception handling process here should really be an appeal to the OGB regarding a conflict between the Community Group sponsoring this release of the SFW consolidation and whichever Community Group is hot to see vim integrated. Strictly speaking, the SFW C-team is the entity holding it up. Your conflict with them is related to the development process itself, which does not include any step in which a message is put in a bottle and sent to Sun Legal and we anxiously await a yes or no reply. So the C-team is not following the correct process, and I would be highly receptive to an appeal on that basis. A reasonable outcome would be one in which the sponsoring CG is reminded of the correct process and advised to ensure that the project teams they endorse are applying it correctly. The OGB has no authority to punish or command a Community Group except by terminating it, but one would expect and hope that a clarification and explanation would be enough to get the C-team doing the Right Thing. Now, why isn't this happening? Several reasons. First, the SFWNV project does not have a Community Group dedicated to sponsoring it as a consolidation release (the original CAB decided not to allow the formation of such a community; in all fairness, there was - and to some extent still is - no real framework to suggest whether or not this was the right decision). Its only sponsor is the Device Drivers Group. Strictly speaking, your conflict would have to be with them. But this also means that the C-team doesn't really exist - and it certainly isn't operating in the open. If we follow that reasoning to its logical conclusion, we'd have no one able to make any decisions about integration and nothing could ever get done. Instead, we have a legacy C-team chosen by Sun and consisting entirely of Sun employees who probably have no reason to believe they're expected to do anything other than what they've always done. That's good in the sense that it's still sometimes possible to get work done, but it also means the process for doing so is opaque and full of unseen obstacles which should not exist. It is worth reading Alan's proposal for consolidation management at http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=137354𡢊 to see one way this might be improved. I know and understand that you don't care about any of this. You just want to see OpenSolaris improve. Good for you; I want to see that too. Unfortunately our disorganised state is making that much more difficult than it needs to be, and Sun's colonialism is proving to be a bigger stumbling block than we might have hoped. As you've seen, some of us have been trying very hard to force change in this area, but progress is slow. > Note: Most of the software distributed within our companion CD (like vim > or gdb) is way way old unlike the software we distribute within /usr/sfw > and how many locations does a programmer need to set in his PATH to get > going ? Recall that /usr/sfw is going away and its contents migrating to /usr/bin. At least that part of your concern is already being addressed. The companion, on the other hand, is ready and waiting for your contributions. If you feel its contents are "too old" (which I hasten to add does not mean "broken" or even "inferior") you are invited to correct that. Of course, most of its contents are also being moved into SFW, so you'd come right back to the same stumbling blocks you're complaining about with respect to vim. Frustrating, isn't it? -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
