[oiac-discuss] OpenIndiana Addon Consolidations

[Guido Berhoerster]

Hello, fellow software porters!

In order to get everyone up to date, and to start a dialogue with
the members of third-party packaging projects about
collaboration, we will provide a rough outline of the planned
project.

The OpenIndiana Addon Consolidations (OIAC) are primarily an
effort to provide OpenIndiana users additional high quality
software packages which are optimally integrated with the rest of
the system. For OpenIndiana (and probably also Belenix)there is,
for example, a demand for alternative desktops such as KDE and
XFCE, so turning these into well integrated alternatives to the
GNOME desktop would fall under this goal. Furthermore, it would
be desirable to cooperate with other Solaris packaging and
distribution communities where possible in order to avoid wasting
scarce resources by duplicating work.

Cooperation could, in our opinion, take different forms; one of
them would be complete integration, where development takes place
within the OI project.  Another possibility would be to consider
such projects as "upstream" for OI where rapid development
continues to take place and contributors from the upstream
project itself or from OI import known stable or tagged versions
of packages at regular intervals, adapt them to the OI packaging
standards and rebrand them.  They would then also be responsible
to feedback, enhancements, and bug reports to an upstream project
and collaboration could e.g. be additionally facilitated by the
use of a common bugtracker.  Projects which operate "upstream"
from OpenIndiana (e.g. Belenix) could handle this similarly.

There is a draft proposal outlining rules and procedures for the
OIAC at:
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/OpenIndiana+Addon+Consolidations

It is primarily derived from the OpenSolaris contrib and Fedora
development processes and incorporates a few ideas from members
of the OpenIndiana community, please note that this is not set in
stone but rather intended as a basis for discussion here. There
are a number of yet unsolved but important issues, namely:

* A solution for dealing with different C++ ABIs (gcc vs.
  SunStudio and stlport vs. stdcxx), currently being discussed
  within SFE as well
* The need for an initial set of macros (possibly improved
  readability, avoidance of boilerplate code, more RPM-like to
  accommodate Belenix?)

So in order to move forward, we would like to invite the members
of SFE, XFCE, KDE Solaris, and Belenix to outline their technical
constraints or requirements and their thoughts of a possible
relationship with OI. Comments on the above draft with concrete
suggestions (either directly in the wiki or here) would be
appreciated as well.


Julian Wiesener
Guido Berhoerster
Albert Lee