[oi-dev] is there a vector for donating to OI?

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-09-09 22:50, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
> A lot of the talk you've seen on the oi-dev mailing list regarding
> changing the default shell, splitting off /usr or switching to Schillix
> is coming from the peanut gallery of people who like to provide their
> opinions on things but who have never actually contributed to the project.

No offense taken ;)

As for the things I wrote about (i.e. splitting the root fs into
components), these are things I did myself with OI and OpenSolaris
before that and with older Solarises way before that (when it was
customary to have many filesystems for core OS components). This
does have certain benefits in exchange for certain complications.

Yes, some people are better at having an erudition and common
sense, others are better in the coding role. None is fundamentally
better, these are just different proficiencies (thoughtlessly coding
something useless is about as bad as having no coding in a software
project at all - so two different heads are better than one).
Some people can change roles depending on amount of coffee and
recency of the last sleep, but I was like that too long ago ;)

So, as far as a peanut gallery goes, I truly did not provide much
code - and I'm not a specialist in that part. I did provide some
improvements to project documentation, some bug reports and ideas.
I thought that did count as contributions to project in general...

Like many other things I wrote on the OI and Illumos wikis, I did
document the procedure (although I agree that a cleaner rewrite is
due, I went over this while setting up my laptop and did find my
own text counter-intuitive at times). Unfortunately, trying to earn
money while raising a baby leaves little time for volunteer work -
but I still hope to code/script and integrate the changes needed to
support the split rootfs if anyone desires to use that on their
systems. I'd be just as happy to help if someone else takes to
implement this and other improvements I propose in vast numbers ;)

As for default /sbin/sh shell, this was only a practical matter
for my project. KSH did not work (has too many dependencies into
/usr space), changing /sbin/sh to BASH did not break anything and
allowed my project to work. I'm happy to use a static-built KSH
just for the sake of not changing the OI ecosystem, if anyone
or myself ever compiles a static KSH binary and RTIs that into
illumos-gate, oi-build or somesuch.

So let's say I'm a typical community member with an opinion what he
wants to do with his desktop/server OS, preferably without applying
homebrewn patches to each installation to make them subjectively
"perfect" - but upstreaming them into the common distribution and
having a choice out of the box. That I am looking forward to doing.

//Jim Klimov