<div dir="ltr">On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Alasdair Lumsden <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:alasdairrr@gmail.com" target="_blank">alasdairrr@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><br><div>TribbliX was a for fun desktop-oriented distro (correct me if I'm wrong) by someone that hates IPS and loves SVR4 packaging. I got the impression Peter never seemed to want to help OI out directly because of the IPS issue.</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>That's partially true, but not entirely. It's true that I hate IPS,<br></div><div>part of that is emotional and psychological scars that will<br></div><div>probably never heal, and they run deep.<br>
<br>I have no particular love for SVR4 - it's there, it's compatible with<br>every other Solaris system I run, it's good enough (unlike IPS), it<br>doesn't suffer from the crippling technical limitations of IPS, and<br>
I'm sufficiently familiar with it that I can use it with zero effort. For a<br></div><div>hobby distro, minimizing effort is paramount. Had I come from<br>a different background, I might have chosen rpm or dpkg.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>Tribblix is definitely for fun, and has the advantage that I completely<br></div><div>understand the needs of its target audience. (Currently, just me.)<br></div><div>Desktop orientation is a reflection of current state rather than future<br>
</div><div>intentions, though.<br><br></div>People naturally work on different things in different ways. If there's<br>a net benefit to working together (and there are always costs to doing<br>so - whether that be making a commitment, surrendering control, fitting<br>
in to alien processes, or having to support something you're opposed to)<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div>then people will do so; it gets much harder if there isn't a net benefit.<br></div><div><br>I decided that the amount of effort I would have to expend to make<br>
</div><div>another distro do what I want was far higher than the effort<br>needed to directly build it from scratch, and I was right on that.<br></div><div>And, just as importantly, I learnt far more from doing so than I<br>
would have otherwise.<br><br></div><div>I suspect that there will always be multiple distros - we have multiple<br></div><div>packaging systems, variant desktop philosophies, appliance vs<br></div><div>server vs desktop vs general-purpose. The real focus ought to be<br>
illumos, and any distro adds to the overall ecosystem.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Strengthening that ecosystem ought to be the goal, not picking<br>a winning distro or forcing people with different aims and objectives<br>
</div><div>to toe some common party line. In many ways, much of that work<br></div><div>needs to be done outside our own community - by working with<br></div><div>other communities to strengthen their support of illumos/Solaris<br>
based systems.<br></div><div><br></div>(Ideally, you want other communities to build and distribute software<br>for you. That's one area where IPS is a huge obstacle - all this<br>repository stuff is an intolerable burden on third parties, pushes you<br>
in the direction of central control and bottlenecks, and discourages<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"></div><div class="gmail_quote">the long tail of drive-by contributors that is key to successful<br></div><div class="gmail_quote">
projects. [See what Linus was talking about recently, although<br></div><div class="gmail_quote">that was about the problems with CLAs. Same issue of reducing<br></div><div class="gmail_quote">barriers to participation, though.])<br>
</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div>-- <br>-Peter Tribble<br><a href="http://www.petertribble.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.petertribble.co.uk/</a> - <a href="http://ptribble.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://ptribble.blogspot.com/</a>
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