On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Giovanni Tirloni <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Ken Mays <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> OpenSolaris-based CD/DVD Distributions as of April 19, 2010: >> [...]>> > > Great list! > > I'm a bit confused about the "distribution" meaning that's commonly used in > OpenSolaris and I've a couple of questions. > > Shouldn't the platform ports be called just "projects" since they could be > integrated in the ON ? Or do they offer different packaging options as well > ? >
The distribution meaning is similar to those in Linux space. These distributions can choose to use different packaging options like SVR4 still being used in BeleniX with RPM/Dpkg being considered next. Nexenta uses Dpkg. > If these distributions are patching the ON (eg. kernel improvements not > making it back to onnv-gate), should they be considered forks? > I do not think too many kernel patches are being applied by the distributions. I initially put in a bunch of changes iin BeleniX to make livecds possible and practical that made their way into upstream ON so that SUN could come out with their own livecd offering. Nexenta had done an exec patch which is maintained as a patch while their comstar zfs integration patch probably made it upstream. They now have a VTL interface for ZVOLs. For BeleniX I have subsequently worked on a couple of more features like incremental performance improvement of compressed lofi and an in-kernel compressed ramdisk support but strangely enough the upstream ON folks showed no interest in taking those. However the limited scope of these changes do not justify calling these kernels forks - far from it actually. We update the patches when moving to a new upstream build. > I don't know if they are always synchronizing with the main OpenSolaris > repository, building and releasing... or have they synchornized in the past > and now are carrying on by themselves ? > At least for BeleniX I can say that it is kept synchronized at a source level, lagging behind somewhat though from the newer builds but never forking off. Everything on BeleniX is built from source on BeleniX itself. It does diverge in respect of compiler in some places (like Gcc4 for C++ stuff instead of SUN Studio) and diverges with respect to package boundaries of some FOSS stacks. The sources of the FOSS stacks are taken with slight modifications from SFW, X11, JDS, manpages, Caiman, and other consolidations in OpenSolaris and rebuilt. In general it is quite compatible. Milax and EON are closer to OpenSolaris in this respect as they use the same IPS packaging and package boundaries and follow the build releases closely. Nexenta is fully compatible at the core kernel and userland levels but bases it FOSS ports stack on Ubuntu's sources and packages. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
