[oi-dev] Time for Divorce from Oracle (was Re: pkg5 Linked Images)

[Alasdair Lumsden]

Hi Ken,

On 30 May 2011, at 22:32, Ken Gunderson wrote:
<snip>
> Your MUA doesn't wrap lines at any reasonable length, which makes
> replying inline more challenging than it should be but a few thoughts:

Sorry. I'm using Apple mail. I looked in the preferences but nothing jumped out, if anyone knows how to adjust this let me know. I'm going to switch to Thunderbird on my macbook when I can find the time, which should hopefully knock the problem on the head.

<snip>
>> Absolutely.. this is the conclusion that I think everyone has come to. It's interesting you raised this now, I was planning on firing off an email tonight on this very topic.
> 
> I think more than a few saw this writing on the wall long, long ago but
> were shot down as Oracle bashers so left and went back to Linux.  I'm
> probably one of few coming from non Solaris background still hanging
> around??

I'd try not to let any of the trolls on the mailing lists influence which OS you use; the OI devs care about OI and if you like the product and where its going then please do stick around! And of course if you don't like where things are going, you can get involved or give feedback.

>> Officially, we should fork. We should update the FAQ and any other docs to reflect this, once we've fleshed out exactly what we mean.
> 
> +1
> 
>> If we don't fork, we're following instead of leading, and this (as you pointed out) means we're just a second class citizen in the Solaris ecosphere. If we want to succeed, we have to innovate, and to innovate, we have to attract top developers. The only way to do this is to lead, and allow people to contribute without fear of being trampled on by upstream.
> 
> Yes, OI doesn't have the $ and developer resources that Oracle has, but
> still in my mind has the much more potential than Solaris because in
> order to fuel those corporate resources Oracle only wants to sell to
> high end, top echelon big enterprises.  This strategy may well make lots
> of money for Oracle but in so doing Solaris will still end up being
> somewhat of niche platform due to being priced out of reach of the
> typical budget conscious enterprise.  Meanwhile, OI could well capture
> this "market".  Attracting developers will be key. And...

Absolutely.

>> Forking will also help with the way things are organised. The way OpenSolaris was developed within Sun, which consisted of different teams around the globe working on different consolidations, with different build systems (some of which are pretty horrid to work with), might work for a large commercial company with paid developers, but it doesn't work for an open source project like ours. It's needlessly complex, and means there's a really high barrier of entry for new developers. People can't easily download the source, get hacking, and install the changes they've made, and get those changes easily integrated.
> 
> As you rightly point out - pretty much a nightmare state of affairs,
> even for experienced developers, as some feedback I've gotten goes.
> Never mind someone who may be somewhat technical but not a coder, e.g.
> sysadmins coming from other platforms.

Yup!

>> We need to overhaul the way things are structured into a single unified build system that is natively IPS based. There has been a lot of interest in using the "userland" consolidation to do this, and collapsing the other consolidations into it. For example pkg5, slim_source, g11n etc can just become components of userland. It should be possible for people to check out the source, make changes, and type "cd foo ; make publish ; pkg install foo". Then if they want to build the ISO, do something like "make live-iso" or "make text-iso". This build system should be contained in a single mercurial repo and branched at each release, so security and bug fixes can be kept easily in it. Bye bye mercurial patch queues.
> 
> Absolutely.  Although I'm not so sure IPS is necessarily the way to go.
> One advantage is that it is here now.  But otoh, there are other mature
> systems out there that might be leverages, e.g. pkg_src from NetBSD or
> apt from Debian.  The latter would be good from making things more
> familiar for Linux users "goal" that some advocate.

Without starting a massive packaging debate, IPS is one of the main non-negotiable points! It's exceptionally good and one of the foundations of the OS. There's no way we could switch now. There's a lot of FUD out there about IPS but I hope over time people will come to realise just how good it is.

>> This wouldn't just help new developers, it would help *everyone*, especially the existing core devs. It would massively speed up development of the OS, and the release engineering process. It would also make keeping the OS up to date with bug and security fixes for the stable branch, because that would be a branch we push updates to.
> 
> Definitely in serious need of overhaul. 
> 
>> We should still leverage the Oracle upstream to import changesets that are of interest to us. But we shouldn't manage our contributions as a set of patches on top.
> 
> And herein lies the biggest key paradigm shift.

Yup. It's a scary one - divorcing from Oracle will make pulling in their changes much harder. But conversely it will set us on our own course.

>> This is what we should be aiming at for the next build after oi_151. I'm due to send out another email related to the public IPS repos and the version numbers used within.
> 
> Rock on, Alasdair!!

:D