<div dir="ltr">G B: There are some build instructions on the wiki. I also put some notes together here <a href="https://gist.github.com/aszeszo/2855864">https://gist.github.com/aszeszo/2855864</a> when building and rebuilding upstream repositories as an experiment. Note that the repos referenced in the gist were not synced with upstream in almost a year. Build commands should apply to OI repos on <a href="http://hg.openindiana.org">hg.openindiana.org</a> though.<div>
<br></div><div style>Andrzej</div><div style><br></div><div style><br></div><div style><br></div><div style><br></div><div style><br></div><div style><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On 8 May 2013 01:11, Alasdair Lumsden <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alasdairrr@gmail.com" target="_blank">alasdairrr@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">Hi,<div><br></div><div>Basically there is nobody left working on the project that I know of apart from Jon Tibble (Meths on irc), who doesn't seem to respond on the mailing lists much, and Milan Jurik who was working on a JDS update. Neither Jon nor Milan have opted to take on leadership status from what I know, so this whole project is a "ghost project" - there's a website, a wiki, a download page, and a package server, but there isn't really anyone here except a few caretakers who occasionally trim the hedges and mow the lawn but mostly keeps to themselves.</div>
<div><br></div><div>There isn't really any single document describing how to "build" OI - it's not an easy task. Under Sun, OpenSolaris was built from a collection of consolidations, a consolidation being a logical grouping of software, and OI inherited this. For example there was:</div>
<div><br></div><div>onnv-gate: Kernel + Core Userland. This is what illumos is today - they forked the last open release of onnv-gate, onnv_147.</div><div><br></div><div>sfw-gate: Sun Freeware - collection of open source utilities. Uses GNU Makefiles for building. Like a poor implementation of FreeBSD ports/pkgsrc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>userland-gate: A replacement for SFW, with a tidier better IPS-ized build system. Also uses GNU Makefiles. Similar to FreeBSD ports tree or pkgsrc. oi-build is a clone of userland-gate, and we wanted oi-build to take over from all the other consolidations.</div>
<div><br></div><div>xnv-gate: The X.Org consolidation, maintained at Oracle by Alan Coopersmith.</div><div><br></div><div>pkg-gate: The IPS software consolidation.</div><div><br></div><div>
vpanels: The visual panels thing.</div><div><br></div><div>Caiman: The installer.</div><div><br></div><div>JDS: The Java Desktop system, based on spec-files technology. Also known as the "gnome" consolidation as it's where gnome lives. Also contains Firefox/Thunderbird/Evolution/etc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>g11n: The internationalisation consolidation with localisation text/strings for apps</div><div><br></div><div>admin/sic_team/solaris_re/etc - Misc other stuff.</div><div><br>
</div><div>You can see the various consolidation source repos here:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://hg.openindiana.org/" target="_blank">https://hg.openindiana.org/</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>
Under Sun, each consolidation was managed by a whole team, many of which were in different geographical locations. As far as I know, JDS was done by Sun India, pkg-gate by staff in Ireland. Each consolidation uses different build systems, each with their own pros and cons, but all requiring quite a lot of domain specific knowledge, with very little documentation provided to get started.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Every 2 weeks these consolidations would be delivered to the Solaris Release Engineering team, who would assemble things together to put out a release. Some of the consolidations produce IPS package repos, some of them produce bundles of SVR4 packages which have to be converted to IPS packages using the distro_import utility. Then everything has to be merged together, then distro-constructor would be run to spit out the installable ISO image.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So you can see, we're talking about a major engineering effort for each release. Sun had loads of staff, so it wasn't an issue. OI however had a small number of volunteers, such as myself, Andrzej Szeszo, Albert Lee, Jon Tibble, etc. We put in an extraordinarily large amount of hours to figure out how it all worked, it took months and months of scratching our heads and hacking away to get stuff to build, and a big push to get the first OI release done, oi_147, and then the subsequent releases oi_148 and oi_151.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I had a grand plan to try to unify all the separate consolidations into what I considered the "best" one, userland-gate, under the name oi-build. I didn't get very far. Nexenta wanted to ditch using the Debian userland in favour of something native, so asked to collaborate with us on oi-build, so it got renamed -illumos-userland. However politics, infighting and a general lack of communication/direction/sanity within Nexenta led to it being stillborn. People got frustrated, bored, and lost interest, including myself. Then I quit, and almost everyone else seems to be working on other things now.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So we're left with a dead project, apart from the work Jon Tibble is doing to periodically update oi_151 with a new illumos-gate release, along with some package updates and fixes as he finds time.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If you want to "build OI", you need to understand that there is no single way to build the whole OS, there is no equivalent of, for example, FreeBSD's "make buildworld". Each consolidation would have to be built separately, then merged with distro_import.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If you just want to update a single package, you could identify what consolidation the software you want to update lives in (which you can see in the packages metadata, for example "<span style="white-space:pre-wrap">set name=org.opensolaris.consolidation value=gnome" indicates the JDS consolidation). Then build that consolidation (or just the package in question). But if any other software depends on what you're updating, you have to rebuild it, and that often crosses consolidation boundaries.</span></div>
<div><br></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">If I had more time and motivation I still think it would be worth sorting the OI mess out, but time and motivation are in very short supply. I started OI because our business used OpenSolaris and we needed a follow on OS to use after Oracle discontinued releases. But then Joyent released SmartOS, which is designed for cloud computing, so we use that - it would be stupid not to. There was then no requirement for me to continue working on OI.</span></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span></font></div><div><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">OmniTI decided that the mess Sun left behind with OpenSolaris was too horrific to even contemplate working with so created their OS from scratch.</span><font color="#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> I think it would have been beneficial for illumos to have a strong general purpose OS with a good desktop, such as OI, but most of the ex-Sun engineers were very hostile to our effort. I think they shot themselves in the foot by not giving us more support. But other desktop distros based on illumos are emerging, such as Tribblix, so natural selection will take its course.</span></font><font color="#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"><br>
</span></font></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span></font></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">I don't personally see a bright future for OI unless a smart, committed new leader steps up and drums up renewed excitement for sorting everything out. Jon and Milan might do micro-updates, but unless they or other people step up to work on all the other areas of the project, such as drumming up interest, marketing, PR, helping new developers on board, it's never going to get very far.</span></font></div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<div><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"><br></span></div><div><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Alasdair</span><br></div><div><br></div></font></span></div>
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