[oi-dev] OpenIndiana and illumos

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 11:45 +0900, BM wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:34 AM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> > And to those of you running OI "in production", you're nuts.  OI has had
> > exactly "one" release (of dubious quality), and has a sum total of a
> > half dozen engineers behind it; and I'm not sure all of them are
> > actually software engineers and not just integrators.  I sure as heck
> > don't advocate illumos for production use *yet*, even though my own
> > desktop runs it.  (Although I'm working hard to get it into a condition
> > when I will be happy to do so.)
> 
> 1. http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Frequently+Asked+Questions#FrequentlyAskedQuestions-WhatistherelationshipbetweenOpenIndianaandIllumos%3F
> 
> 2. http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Available+IPS+Repositories — there
> is a placeholder for http://pkg.openindiana.org/illumos
> 
> As of points are totally valid and OI should move to Illumos, yet
> nobody went around to insult people called them "nuts" or "fools" (on
> IRC), who made a mistake to use that super-buggy Nexenta, that was
> constantly losing dependencies, screwing up APT and is based on a
> prehistoric Debian repos. Maybe we also should join nexenta-dev@ and
> yapping all the users are morons that using it, what you think? And
> because of that never happend, Anil could do a great job, trying to
> fix that stuff step by step.

Hey, I can't speak for whatever Nexenta was up until recently, but to be
completely honest, I would not advocate using Nexenta Core Platform in
production either.  Why not ? Because it lacks support -- its the open
source base of NS but is not really intended for production use on its
own.  If you want a commercially supported storage platform, use
NexentaStor.  Nexenta Systems is not a general purpose operating system
vendor, and we don't pretend to be.

I can tell you that NexentaStor 3.0.4 released earlier this week is
likely to prove the most stable release of NexentaStor ever.  But NS is
an application specific deployment of the technology, and doesn't
purport to be a general purpose operating system.

All that said, NCP version 4.x is going to be still better, as we're
moving away from Ubuntu and to Debian, and even for those bits we are
moving to having illumos bits by default, rather than GNU bits.  There's
a lot of additional features and enhancements we're making, as well as
additional bug fixes.   So Nexenta is employing world class software
engineers to develop and maintain its product.  And the team is growing.

> 
> If I were you, I would apologize for this.

If people's feelings were hurt by this remark, then I'm sorry.  But I
also stand by my remarks; using a first version development release
product with no commercial support and not real software engineers
"supporting it" is nuts.  This isn't any fault of the OI guys -- I
wouldn't recommend using illumos in production yet either, and I'm the
illumos tech lead.

(Now the situation is different if you think you're smart enough to
provide your own tech support for the product.  Although I don't know
many shops that are equipped to do their own support just on the 15M
lines of code that make up ON, never mind all the *rest* of the
product.)

> 
> P.S. I don't really give a hoot about 151a or "too little / too late",
> because some of our machines are running snv_127 and older, some of
> them has even Solaris 8, which is old enough to get another "nut"
> award. :-(
> 

Solaris 8 was rock solid.  Running an older proven release makes sense,
although you are still playing a bit fast and loose running snv127 which
IIRC had some nasty bugs in it and was never supported in any way by
Oracle.

	- Garrett