Hi, your email just arrives when I am having some thoughts about the future of OI but my conclusions are quite different. I have to admit that I am in no way an accomplished sys admin or system developer but a researcher with extensive practice of night of programming accompanied with beer and pizza (cliché).
Considering the amazing work that Alasdair Lumsden, Jon Tibble, Ken Mays, Milan Jurik, Alex Viskovatoff and many others... have been carried out and are still doing, it seems to me that a slowed down development does not involve necessarily switching instantly (like changing between 15 mp3 players in command line) especially since any unstable OI has been more polished than any stable Ubuntu I've been using at work. Maybe this is rather time to rethink OpenIndiana a bit to move to a next phase. This phase could be simply more community involvement. I seem to understand that managing all the consolidations inherited from Sun is quite heavy and from what I read from Alasdair "hard to chew" and so far considering the limited manpower compared to other project the progresses are considerable. Nevertheless it seems that there is a substantial user base, which could contribute in many ways if they are provided a common "sandbox". I wrote few emails in the past days talking about setting up some Redmine website at openindiana.org (like the good old hub. ) where a "Packaging community" project could serve as a bridge between users/external developers and OI developers and the pkgbuild-SFE team, by: - submitting request for review new spec files, - submitting bug reports, - writing documentation, - giving pointers to projects related to OI and Illumos (like this valgrind port for Solaris compatible systems). Another "Project community" could serve as a front end for project proposals: I have two things in mind that I want to implement for instance, providing a pkgbuild-SFE environment using IPS (so that people can compile from source with the same environment ) and modifying the Device Driver Utility to feed a database with supported hardware (HCL strikes back). One outcome could be that new contributors could help for the SFW and Add-on consolidation and lower the workload on main OI developers: focus on production grade quality for the core server and provide community supported desktop consolidations (testing-grade then). As I mentioned, I am not myself in the IT/Computer Sciences industry but rather a rather experienced user, C++/Python programmer for applied maths who has worshiped the SUN and non-SUN developers behind OSOL since 2005/2006 ;) (unfortunately at that time I had a PhD to get done.) I started contributing to SFE just now with the aim of developing packaging of scientific software for OI: I have already MPI implementations, linear solvers, Scilab in progress, Paraview, TexLive 2012 in progress, some R packages that I am testing following from a discussion a week ago on this list. It's going really fast: tomww, Ken Mays and Logan Bruns have been really helpful and wrote notes that could be a starting point for tutorials. This specific domain (scientific software) is just one example. If this kind of "packaging community" others could gain visibility and help the SFE team to move forward, it will help the community in a broader sense to develop a more formalized packaging cycle. On the other side I think OI is a really good entry point for "niche" applications of Illumos like SmartOS and Nexenta: maybe I am mistaken, but synergies look like a good thing on the papers. People I know, develop on an OS they can install on a workstation or a laptop: dismissing completely Desktop looks suicidal. If OI developers are interested as well as other users on this mailing list, and if we have the opportunity to host a "community hub" and little by little move forward to more community (i.e every OI user). I know that Illumos has that but OI needs its own platform to function. So if people are interested I am willing to implement this: setup this portal, write any possible documentation, port software, create this scientific project as a first shot and see if it works out... etc... This proposal as you have understood is not meant to change the way OI developers work and the SFE team works but more like open a door, allow easier code/spec reviews on Redmine, avoid duplicate work (packaging, bugs solving, documentation) and better interaction between users/developers and the team who has accomplished so much in the past 2 years. Sorry for the long email. I will be happy to help in any way and if my humble proposal finds some echo, I will be glad to start working on possible solutions. Best regards, Aurélien On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Bob Friesenhahn < bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote: > On Fri, 7 Dec 2012, alka wrote: > > hi all >> >> Currently i use and recommend OI as the main ZFS/Illumos based platform- >> but its more than obvious that the future development is stalled. >> > > What causes you to believe that future development is stalled? > > I am a couple of minor updates behind (on u5 rather than u7) but the > update manager says that there are over 900 packages to be updated. That > does not feel like "stalled" to me. > > Bob > -- > Bob Friesenhahn > bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/** > users/bfriesen/ <http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/> > GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ > > > ______________________________**_________________ > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list > OpenIndiana-discuss@**openindiana.org<OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org> > http://openindiana.org/**mailman/listinfo/openindiana-**discuss<http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss> > -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LARCHER Aurélien | KTH, School of Computer Science and Communication Work: +46 (0) 8 790 71 42 | Lindstedtsvägen 5, Plan 5 Mob.: +46 (0) 7 09 46 40 17 | 100 44 Stockholm, SWEDEN ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Praise the Caffeine embeddings ... _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
