On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Calum Benson wrote: > On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 04:19 -0700, Alan DuBoff wrote: > >> I do wonder why we need to have a different GNOME desktop? Well, I know >> why we do it (i.e., JDS), but I'm not sure why we should. It only diverges >> us from the mainstream, and makes things different. Seems better to >> leverage the mainstream GNOME project to me, and be the same, the Ubuntu >> uses a stock GNOME desktop, AFAICT. > > It doesn't really, Ubuntu have a whole ream of local patches just like > we do, and other distros like SuSE have a lot more. They arguably do a > better job of getting theirs upstream, but they also have the advantage > of being Just Another Linux. It often takes longer to get the GNOME > community to buy into Solaris patches, particuarly if they also happen > to change the way things work on Linux.
Actually this is one of our advantages, IMO, that we're not just another Linux distribution. We're a Solaris/OpenSolaris distribution and that in itself needs to carry it's own clout. >> It confuses me that zfs has been out for >> about a year and a half and we don't see our desktop folks doing that type >> of simple integration. Being able to take snapshots, list information on >> zfs filesystems, or getting the status of a zpool, those are all things >> that should be available for the user. > > I agree, and we have had people working on ZFS desktop integration > prototypes on and off over the past couple of years. But as always it's > a question of resources and priorities, and as yet it just hasn't been > made a high enough one for us to drive to completion. (There's nothing > that says Sun has to do the work, of course.) Well, to give them credit, the zfs filesystem is not your average problem to solve, Jeff Bonwick went out on a limb and tried to design and build the worlds best filesystem. It will mature over time, but there's a lot of interest, and I consider this to be the best thing that has gone back to Solaris/OpenSolaris since S10. Remeber that zfs went into S10u2. The only thing I would have done different given the limited resources in engineering, would have been to license under the BSD 3 clause so that anyone, any system, could have taken the code to incorporate into their system, even Linux. It seems that will happen if Sun does GPL2 and/or GPL3 the OpenSolaris sources, and I don't know if they will do that, just that they have mentioned that in the press. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
