Bob Palowoda wrote: > I have to ask. How would you know when an OpenSolaris > distribution crosses that magical threshold of becoming > a product to define when "OpenSolaris Private" is allowable?
It never should be. Instead of "OpenSolaris Private", use "Committed". The original intent of "Sun Private" was to be some sort of "Product Private" label, where the various consolidations that made up Solaris could put/find the glue needed to build and install the product. And then the scope of the product got larger - Solaris went from being just an OS kernel to being a desktop OS, then an enterprise OS and then a kitchen sink with Java middleware, production databases and developer tools all thrown in. At this point, its an an attractive nuisance that should just go away. (Sort of like the current US administration...^H^H^H^H^H^H^H) The intent of the interface taxonomy, IMnsHO, is simply a codification of abstraction principles: Private stuff is an implementation detail, Public stuff is intended to be used by others. While component developers are always involved with implementation details, others should never depend on them. If they do, they get trapped into a lockstep dependency with the implementation - it changes and their stuff breaks, so they must also change. What does "Sun Private" mean in this context? As it is an implementation detail (...Private), it is not intended to be used/reused by anyone, yet it is exposed to all other Sun products for their reuse. This implies that either the interface is going to be extremely stable release to release, or that every single Sun product that reused the interface will have to deal with synchronized flag days, reacting with new releases of their own every time the interface changes. As the latter is impractical, the end result is that an interface labeled "Sun Private" can never change. And, they can not be used by customers unless their stability level is changed to the corresponding public Committed level. That is, to have a Sun Private interface, the project team must do all the stability work that would be required for a Committed interface, but customers can't use it. So back to your question - the transmogrification of "Sun Private" into the open source world should always be "Committed". Distro-specific features don't need this classification - Consolidation Private to the distro's "glue" consolidation should more than suffice - after all, only the distro maintainers are effected by the changes that they make to their distro's glue consolidation... -John
