I. Szczesniak wrote:
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Garrett D'Amore <gdam...@sun.com> wrote:
Hugh McIntyre wrote:
Garrett D'Amore wrote:
This platform is doomed from lack of resource to properly support, so we
should just remove it.
I can't comment on the webrev, but I guess the basic question is whether
Tadpole are still selling Solaris laptops (their website says so, but it
lists US-IIe and IIIi based products for which the CPUs may not be easily
available, so the page might be old). And whether there are any issues
w.r.t. Tadpole if their platform gets dropped.
Sun has no commitment to Tadpole to support these laptops.
This is Opensolaris.org, not sun.com and the ON code is shared between
Sun and the community.
Yes, and no. Its still true that Sun's C-Team and P-Teams decides what
goes in, and what comes out. Sun is still the ultimate gatekeeper,
although some say is given to the community. One place in which this
occurs is at PSARC.
Ultimately at the end of the day it is Sun that bears the support burden
for code in ON, as the number of meaningful contributions from the
hobbyist community -- particularly in the form of device driver and
platform support -- is quite small indeed.
Note that *nobody* commented meaningfully on the PSARC case materials I
submitted.
Tadpole has
their own copy of the source, and has historically shipped their own
customized version of the OS, for Solaris 8, 9, and 10 at least. I do not
believe they are still selling US-II based systems (either US-IIe or
US-IIi). In any event, they can continue to provide software support on
their own if they still need to -- they have the sources and expertise to do
this, as well as the experience of doing it in the past.
Btw, their customers are primarily military in nature, and are unlikely to
adopt OpenSolaris anytime soon. (Most of them were still running Solaris 8
the last I checked -- which was a couple of years ago.)
For example, the ARC case 2009/538 does not really address this (and it
may not be appropriate for pubic debate).
Of course if the answer is "removal has been approved, and it's just a
code review question" then that's a narrower issue in which case someone
else needs to comment on the code review itself.
Removal *has* been approved,
which can quickly be revoked if I appeal the case. I DO have such a
laptop and I do not like the ad hoc removal of SPARCLE support in such
a short time frame.
Actually, it would be hard for you to appeal it in a manner that would
be meaningful at this point. The reasons for this really come down to
the fact that we have never completed the support for this platform, due
to lack of resources and interest (the power button doesn't work in
OpenSolaris!), and the fact that the display is not supported under
OpenSolaris. The display will in fact not be supported under
OpenSolaris at any time, as the entire group has been defunded.
The fact that you can use this unit under SXCE today notwithstanding,
there is no future for OpenSolaris with this hardware. (SXCE has
already been separately announced as ending with build 128. So this
unit is already effectively doomed anyway.)
For the record, I also tried to contact Tadpole to inquire about this,
but none of my e-mails have received an answer. I think even Tadpole
has lost interest in these units at this time.
and its just a code review at this point.
Garrett,
did you ask Tadpole to comment in the ARC case?
I tried to contact my past contacts at Tadpole (Andy Giles among them)
*before* I submitted the ARC case. I never received a reply.
Did you ask if any
person in the community wishes to make a SPARC laptop distro?
If any person in the community wants to do this, they can still do so.
They can take the code we already have, and start a new consolidation
based on it, with *just* support for for Tadpole (or other) SPARC
laptops. In fact, this is pretty much what Tadpole does for Solaris
10. The code does not *need* to be in ON.
I'm happy to supply the code separately should anyone in the community
wish to do this.
- Garrett
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