[oi-dev] [developer] First illumos-userland hackathon

[Bayard Bell]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org> wrote:
> I'm glad to see this, although a little disappointed that its strictly an illumos userland bit -- why not also include some opportunity for illumos-gate.

I've definitely been encouraging people with a primary interest in
porting and packaging who are interested in distro development to get
more involved with illumos-gate as our closest upstream. I've done a
scan of issues in the OI tracker recently, and there's a decent amount
of stuff that needs upstream resolution, so one of the things I might
do is create upstream issues for that and walk people through fixing
as many of those as possible. The distros are definitely one place
where the rubber hits the road for illumos-gate, and I'd like to see
more of that fed back into illumos-gate for resolution. If people in
the community are willing to use our stuff in anger, we should oblige
them with a measure of support. One of the things that's on my list to
get going is a community backline, which would pull issues from all
the distros (SmartOS, illumian, OI), get them proposed diagnosed,
identify already existing fixes (Joyent's way ahead on this with
SmartOS), and drive resolution in illumos-gate.

If I were putting this in a larger context, I'd say we've addressed
our first challenge as a community, which is showing that we can have
a critical mass of developers successfully working under distributed
ownership, moving our codebase forward. Our next challenge seems to me
to be providing processes for maintaining production quality,
including providing a degree of shared risk management for distro
support, emphasizing the ever-moving target that is working code
without getting caught up in the kings and presidents governance
questions. If we mean to embrace the devops concept, this seems a
strategic way to do it.

Cheers,
Bayard