[oi-dev] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

[Christopher Chan]

On Saturday, January 15, 2011 11:35 PM, Guido Berhoerster wrote:

>> To make the above easier to manage, one proposal I have is to match the versions of Apache, PHP, MySQL, Tomcat etc to the same versions shipped in RHEL 6/CentOS 6. This way we can monitor their repositories for security updates against these packages, and share the same backports. This will make life a lot easier for us as a project.
>
> I strongly object to this approach, not only would it be a large
> amout of work to update all these packages but we would also need
> to do a lot of QA work and ensure they all work together.

It might probably be just the initial preparation that takes a lot of 
work. eg: Instead of building against glibc and with gcc, things would 
be built against sun libc and with sun cc. Once the initial spec files 
are worked out, automating the process for updated packages should be 
pretty much possible would it not?


> Furthermore, RHEL is a totally different platform, packages have
> different patches etc., not every issue in RHEL needs to apply
> to OI and vice versa. Such a Frankenstein-Release is just
> unfeasible.

Certainly kernel related stuff in RHEL would not apply and also 
configuration path related patches won't too. It should be simple to 
identify these packages/patches and leave them out. The rest will 
probably apply unless they are linux kernel related which again would be 
identifiable.


> You could probably piggyback on Solaris Express and update all
> non-ONNV consolidations to b151a but even that would be a lot of
> potentially unnecessary work.
> I think the best approach is probably to just do what everybody
> else does and monitor upstream projects and security mailing list
> and to port patches.

Which would take more work? Constant monitoring like you say or doing 
some preparatory work and letting future autobuild flag you for 
something that fails to build?


>
> Since this is just a bridge for those who already use OpenSolaris
> or OI in production I'm categorically against demands for feature
> additions sucha as providing postfix and a pony that already seem
> to pop up.
> This is a temporary solution, so please let's treat it that way.
>

Merci. I guess I would have to look elsewhere then. Nice comparing 
postfix to a pony. I would have thought something like zimbra would be a 
pony, not a mainstay like postfix.