Brian Gupta wrote:
Joseph,
I have made an effort to incorporate your comments into a new list.
Primary Drivers:
----------------------
1) There is a desire for a minimal/core OpenSolaris distro, that other
distro packagers can leverage to create their own distros. Building a
distro from this core *may*, in the future, allow other distros to also
be hosted at OpenSolaris.org. This OS core must, for the sake of
practicality, allow layers to be added on top to get to Nevada.
I think this is the wrong model. If you presume that layers can be built
upon each other to arrive at a end application, then you risk missing the
application's requirements. In truth, application requirements should
drive the distro, but the interdependencies are often unknown, and perhaps
unknowable. Perhaps this is the problem you are trying to solve?
Or are you just confusing modular with layered?
2) Currently their is no Open development platform. The only allowed
development platform is, a closed source, proprietary platform: Sun
Solaris (Express). Ideally guardianship for this development platform
should be moved into the community. (Yes this seems in opposition to
bullet #1, but keep reading) This is a "Free Speech" issue, which not
everyone cares about, but it is an important facet of the open source
movement. (After all it's not FreeSolaris.org). In addition by not
prioritizing this the status quo is likely to continue for some time.
(IE: Why fix "what isn't broken"? We need to put out a slightly impaired
totally open source distro. If the missing closed source functionality
turns out to be important, open source replacements are going to be made.
This doesn't make sense to me. I kinda like NVidia (and other) products,
which will likely be closed source for a very, very long time. Why would
we handicap Solaris by not having NVidia support? OTOH, if the approach
is to encourage open source, then that is a different task, and one that
seems to be already in progress. At the end of the day, consumers want
something that works, and limited resources may be best spent making things
work.
As for "only allowed development platform," I've never known those words
to have any affect on a developer, except in Redmond ;-).
The barrier is complexity and I don't see how this proposal makes things
simpler. How can we make things simpler?
3) Current HW requirements are a bit on the high end. I can't run this
on an old 386, or for that matter on an old P/PII I have lying around.
And the thought is that Sun wouldn't include such projects in it's
Solaris distribution, for ecconomic and support reasons. Ideally Solaris
should be able to run on a 386 w/ 4MB of RAM (High end I know)
Realistically let's call the target i486DX, 8MB RAM, and 200MB HD. The
community can determine the supported hardware list.
Stop global warming! Stop running old, weak, power-hungry computers! :-)
But more seriously, there was an effort, about 18 years ago, to shrink
SunOS down so that you could run it on a 4 MByte workstation. The compromises
made took years to undo, even as the technology evolved such that you
can't buy machines that small anymore. We've been living with the warts
from this effort for a long time. I see this as struggle of moving forward
versus backward, along the technology curve. The horse and buggy was
eventually replaced by the automobile, but it took a long time to make
automobiles not look like buggies. My recommendation is to not look at
going backwards as a feature, it has little real market value.
Incidentally, I happen to own 30 horses and 3 buggies, it is a fun hobby,
but I don't think we're targeting hobbiests, are we?
4) Sun (Ian/Indiana/Others) wants a second Solaris distro that will be
the Fedora to Sun's RHEL (Solaris). They wish to do this and still leave
a clear migration path from one distro to another. (Unlike Fedora).
Yes! I think we can all get behind this sort of vision. But making a better
Fedora than Fedora may not be the best strategy. We can be more clever than
that.
Although this may be considered a commercial driver outside of the
community, let's keep in mind who makes the community possible. I as a
member of the community want to see our host prosper, and continue to be
able to provide support to our community. (If this was a Linux vendor
launching a new community distro, there wouldn't be nearly as much
opposition)
I don't think you're seeing opposition to a new distro. I think you're
seeing a recognition that yet-another-distro doesn't necessarily solve
the long-term problem of building the best platform for innovation.
If we accept the vision of a distro that can take OpenSolaris forward
to the next level, what would that next level look like?
-- richard
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