On Mon, 9 Jun 2008 15:40:16 -0400
James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Mike Meyer writes:
> > On Mon, 9 Jun 2008 14:39:13 -0400 James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > Ah, ok. But the problem is that the "project as a whole" is a giant
> > > pile o' source. It's not any particular distribution.
> >
> > Any software project is a giant (or maybe not so giant) pile of
> > bits. It's the community that surrounds them that provide their
> > character. The GNU/Linux project has no single control, and we've
> > talked about the results. The FreeBSD community has a single control,
> > so that even though there are multiple distributions, there's a base
> > that's shared between them all, and you can expect non-base components
> > that are shared to be built the same way on them all - including the
> > package system.
> We've so far demonstrated that we don't have such a central control,
> though some seem to want it. The communities control their respective
> technical areas, but there's no Central Committee that creates our
> 5-year plans. ;-}
Don't really need a 5-year plan. Just need a definition of what it
means to be an "OpenSolaris distribution" sufficiently tight that you
can write software for "OpenSolaris", instead of "Nevada" or "Indiana"
or "Debian OpenSolaris" or ...
> The closest we have is the OGB, but it concerns itself mostly with
> governance issues, and not technical matters.
Deciding whether there should be a definition of what it means to be
an OpenSolaris distribution doesn't seem like technical issue to me.
> I think it's actually a much, much smaller issue than you seem to be
> making it out to be, as the distributions are generally able to use
> each other's packaging, and the controls we have on compatibility are
> far tighter than you'll find in some other communities, so build
> variances matter much less, but I do find it a bit hard to start a
> discussion about something that we don't have with the people who
> aren't doing it. :-/
Well, I disagree about the how large an issue it is, based on watching
the mail lists and my own recent experiences. And the usual solution
to a user asking for something a project doesn't have is to either
agree that it would be nice to have, and then ask if they're willing to
volunteer to work on it; or decide that it would be a bad thing to
have, and tell them why. Having a discussion about whether or not it's
a bad thing isn't even unusual. Of course, I was just trying to found
out whether or not it existed, or how the headaches I see in systems
that don't have it are avoided.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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