Brandorr wrote: > A compatibility test, that says, "verify that this is the same exact > set of bits" is an audit, not a compatibility test. You are defining > compatibility in such a way that only the thing being tested against
As the one who wrote those words, along with an email stating that: > What if the test suite was simply an audit that this distro did, in fact, > get built out of the required packages from the required repository? > > Not quite as hard as a full functional test (and maybe not quite as > useful in the long term...), but potentially good enuf to get to the > next stage... isn't in violent, 100% agreement with what you are saying? We don't have any tests now, and I didn't have time to whip any up out of thin air, so I stuck the issue somewhere where it wouldn't get forgotten. It sounds like you have energy to run with this - please do so; flesh out some structure behind this topic on the wiki... > Currently I can take Blastwave packages compiled for Solaris 8, and > install and run them on Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10, SX[CD]E > b1-75, Nexenta, Martux, etc. Are these distros incompatible or > compatible? I'd say that we *want* them to be, therefore the question to ask is what the "branding quality control" tests need to look like to make that happen? (Though blastwave isn't necessarily a good example - it carries along its own compatibility core set of packages that isolate it from the host OS...) [I added some of your comments to the wiki - please elaborate on them there...] > But then again this whole compatibility discussion, predicates that as > a community we have consensus on a need for an OpenSolaris reference > distro. I don't recall any community vote saying that need exists. How > can we write guidelines, presuming the existence of such a beast? By doing what we think is best, by trying, failing, trying, succeeding, trying... Where was the community consensus that said we wanted to do ksh93, DTrace, the bugfix for [XXX, YYY and ZZZ], etc? - you won't find it. Development efforts - especially open source ones - don't work that way, they work by people seeing a need, and going off and addressing that need. If they did a good job at it, the community adopts their work... -John _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
