> Quite; having a "Reference Distro" to develop on would help, though, > as it allows customers to determine whether an ISV supplied > package works on the reference distro as promised and whether the > issue is unique to their distro or not.
I think Indiana will be the defacto reference distro on the midterm, alone for the fact that it originates from opensolaris.org, that a lot of Sun people are involved and that it's currently the most visible one. So that's already covered for free. Until an Ubuntu-level derivate comes along and grabs the biggest share of users. >> What should be made sure is that there's a conformance test where you >> can hand out sort of a e-badge, that tells an user that the kernel >> hasn't been screwed with custom patches (unlike what every major Linux >> distro does). This would be of interest for driver developers. > > That's still a hard problem to solve and I think that that is > not where I would expect divergence to occur first and foremost. I suppose so, but I'm talking strictly kernel. There should be at least an afterthought regarding this. Because once there's a flood of posts like "OMG all drivers broke with the Moonaris 2.31 update! That's it, I'm going back to Linux!" just because the Moonaris developers figured they had to introduce some homebrewn performance tweaks while still claiming to be 100% OpenSolaris, it's too probably late. Especially considering the planning time needed to create a kernel conformance test afterwards. Doesn't the kernel team have huge test suites and unit tests that can be used for this? If tweaks to the kernel break various third party drivers (and possibly internal things), they'd probably also make some of the tests fail. > I would expect libraries to be missing, be in different locations, have > different versions, different "SONAME"s and that sort of thing; different > version of GNOME etc. As said, I'm thinking kernel only currently. Shipping closed source drivers in Linux is a big pain, since it involves jokes like binary blobs and source code that has to be compiled on install time, followed by driver breaking on kernel updates. Not to mention all custom patches that differ with every distro. An advantage of OpenSolaris is that there is a stable ABI, there isn't a license involved that requires you to spill your secrets, as well a lack of militant mindset that everything closed source is the pest. -mg
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