Gary wrote:
Why didn't Sun use the engineering path of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, namely the
-release, -stable, -current branches instead of doing the OpenSolaris thing to
pry it into the next Solaris 10 successor?
For example, FreeBSD had the framework for virtual networking in the 7.2
release and it is available in 8.0, although it isn't ready for production, but
should be in 8.1.
Why couldn't Crossbow had been put in Solaris -current and then it makes its
way into Solaris -release? When ready for production release it becomes
Solaris 11.
OpenSolaris is more like OpenBSD forking from NetBSD. OpenBSD is NOT NetBSD
and vice versa. OpenSolaris may be a fork of Solaris, but it IS a different
operating system.
/ALL/ operating systems are different across releases - that is, it's
entirely valid to say that OpenSolaris is a significantly different
operating system than Solaris 10, but again, the same can be said for
FreeBSD 8 vs FreeBSD 9. It's very subjective (and artificial) where the
line is drawn as to what constitutes "different OS", especially between
those OSes which share a common codebase ancestor.
Here's how you look at it (the analogy isn't perfect, but roughly
equivalent):
FreeBSD -release is the same as the latest Solaris 10 Update N (where N
is the latest published one)
FreeBSD -stable is the same as what is going into Solaris 10 Update N+1
FreeBSD -current is the OpenSolaris development tree
FreeBSD -snapshots is equivalent to named releases of OpenSolaris (e.g.
OpenSolaris 2009.06)
In all cases, both in *Solaris and *BSD, it requires (often nontrivial)
effort for code to be ported from one branch to another. You can't just
magically merge the code between the branches (for either OS). Many
features from OpenSolaris have been backported to Solaris 10, and made
available in the next Update release. ZFS and Dtrace are prominent
examples. However, Crossbow is currently not slated to be one of these
projects backported, as the cost to do so has not been show to be worth
it (it's a huge change to the existing codebase, and it was deemed too
risky & costly to try to backport).
Even in FreeBSD, you will note that there is a considerable amount of
stuff in both -stable and -current that never makes it to the same
-release branch (i.e. it waits until there is a whole new release, e.g.
9.0 in this case)
Neither development model is better than the other, they're just
different, and there is no use wishing they were the same (they're
different for historical reasons, and changing brings no real benefit
for the costs involved).
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
