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

[Philip J. Robar]

On May 30, 2011, at 6:53 PM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:

>>> 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 user land.
>>> 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.

I agree that we need to keep IPS. Packaging and their dependencies are a lot harder of a problem than many people realize. For instance take a look at this short article by Bart Smaalders:

	http://blogs.oracle.com/barts/entry/satisfaction

I think that a lot of people who make very significant contributions to open source projects would just stare at you blankly at the mention of terms like "boolean satisfiability solvers" and "conjunctive normal form".

Some really smart people at Sun, like Bart, took a good hard look at what it would take to solve this problem and came up with IPS. If Bart says that IPS is the way to go then that's good enough for me*.

Phil
* Disclaimer Bart was a colleague and acquaintance of mine when I worked at Sun. Along with just about everyone else in the OS/Net group he's one of the smartest people I've ever met.

--
"What do you think of the Macintosh now?"
It is the least unsatisfactory personal computer I know of, but that's an easy win, considering the competition. — Jay Freeman (Author of Wraith Scheme)