On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Ceri Davies wrote: > On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 12:08:12PM -0600, Jon Trulson wrote: [...] >> >> FWIW, as a third party that develops software on Solaris, I would >> welcome an 'OpenSolaris Reference' distribution. >> >> Without it, we would be forced to choose one or two of the dists >> available to try to officially support, much as we have to do now on >> Linux. > > There's your example of harm; Jon Trulson would be supporting only > the reference distribution and not the other distros. This can be > expected to hold true for others. [1] > > Ceri
Is that really harm? Just how incompatible are the current open solaris based dists out there? What we (and I assume, other 'commercial' developers) care about is the binary compatibility, stability of the kernel API, userland interface - libc, basic commands (shell, cp/rm/etc), and of course the packaging mechanism, to name a few. Kernel/Userland compatibility within major Solaris revisions is a also big plus. I would hope that any dist based on an 'OpenSolaris' reference, or whatever it will be called, would be consistant in these areas...? If so, then yes - we would probably develop/test only on the 'reference implementation'. Hopefully (!) the other dists based on it would be compatible in these areas, but we could make no guarantees. As it is on linux, we choose a few of the 'popular' and 'supported' dists for development and testing. If it works on other linux dists, then great. If not, too bad. We simply cannot support them all. I really hope that Solaris (in whatever incantation) never ends up this way. > > [1] This can, of course, be seen to be a good thing for ISVs, but that's > not the question which was one of harm to other distros. I guess I just do not see the harm - indeed I would see it (a reference implementation) as a major plus, and probably a neccessity for Sun's customers. -- Happy cheese in fear | Jon Trulson against oppressor, rebel! | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Brocolli, hostage. -Unknown | #include <std/disclaimer.h> _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
