>> but we at Sun actually have no control over these interfaces.
> Sun control is not the point here
A big difference between Solaris {2.0, 2.1, ... 2.8, 2.9, 2.10} and
OpenSolaris is the belated acknowledgment that not all problems are
best solved by freezing APIs in stone. Unfortunately, that
understanding has not yet found its way into ARC best practices and/or
policies, so it is no wonder that FOSS projects like this are left
somewhat clueless.
We used to think that incompatible changes to interfaces found in/on
Solaris were always Bad, and that evolutionary stability was always a
Good Thing. What we found was that, while stability was desirable,
being different/old/stale from what was available elsewhere was even
worse.
The key in my mind is "available elsewhere" - as on Linux distros,
sourceforge downloads, etc. I don't think anyone is arguing that we
should relax our stability expectations for core OS things that make
it possible to do distributed development on drivers, OS modules and
subsystems - those things are somewhat native to our system.
But.
Things like Gnu tools, desktops, middleware and the like are another
matter - we live in a heterogeneous world where platform differences
cause severe developer and end-user problems. The users of these
programs/libraries are already well aware of the evolutionary
stability -vs- perceived value tradeoffs, and resent efforts on our
part to arbitrarily or artificially manipulate their options.
In my mind, ANY FOSS project that doesn't support the concurrent
installation of multiple versions on a system is fundamentally broken.
Of course, there should be an architectural framework for them to do
this, and that framework should support the concepts of "default
version" as well as "version used by the OS" because those versions
may or may not be the same at any given point in time.
There were a few cases over in WSARC-land a few years ago about
architecturally coherent silos of middleware, but I don't think there
has been any substantive activity since then.
Where is the ARC leadership in this area?
-John
