On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Nick Kew <Nicholas.Kew at sun.com> wrote: > We've been discussing internally Sun's plans for our work > with the Apache web server (HTTPD and APR) in the webstack.
Thanks for opening up the conversation! > As a first topic, here's the executive summary overview > of our broad goals in this work as I see them. > In no particular order: > - Improve the webstack/coolstack bundles in OpenSolaris. > - Contribute to the broader community, including upstream > development at apache.org. > - Seek ways to make apache-on-solaris a killer platform, > and a sellingpoint for solaris over other platforms. Now, I'm sold on the principle. I use apache on Solaris, and do so because it's cheap, easy, reliable, and powerful. What I don't do is use any webstack components from Sun. Sun supply Solaris; we build the web stack ourselves by directly obtaining the components from their source. So what's Sun's role here? Or what can be done so that people like me might take advantage of the work that Sun does on webstack rather than building it ourselves? It's not as if I can give a good reason for not using Sun's version. But some of the following things spring to mind: - we need to support Solaris 8 to current - we need absolutely current components (and older ones too - any given application is tested and certified against a given set of component versions) - we need to disconnect the web components from the underlying OS, so that they can be updated independently - we use zones a lot. Sparse root zones, so the OS is shared. But different components of the web stack will be at different versions in different zones, so using the bundled shared apache etc isn't viable. And we migrate zones between systems at different release and patch levels (notes - this isn't zone migration, this is purely application migration from a zone on one system to another) and the applications have to be unchanged. In some ways, this is closer to the notion of user images in IPS than anything we have at the moment, although we have no need for any of the package management after we've laid an application down. It's not really useful as the input you may have wanted, but I just wanted to make the point that all the wonderful work you do may be wasted if users don't feel able to use the bits you deliver. I have some more philosophical thoughts, but that's another message. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
