[oi-dev] State of development

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-04-15 20:56, Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz wrote:
> Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
>> OpenIndiana was started as an open source community developed distro
>> similar to Debian, but due to a
>> lack of interest there are only a few developers working on it part
>> time, so updates are slow, and
>> limited in scope due to the size of the project.
>
> Does this means that you think OpenIndiana is dead ? If yes, how to
> avoid it ?

That is a two-fold question.

If it is "how to avoid OI" - the answer is, alas, trivial ;)

If it is "how to avoid DEATH of OI" - commit fixes and RFE/bug reports.
One frequently requested vector is regular and frequent integration of
updated versions of common open-sourced software and particularly of
security patches (maybe porting of those and feeding back upstream, if
existing bugfixes are not verbatim applicable on Solaris/illumos/OI).

Test the new solutions provided by upstream code repositories that they
don't break OI and provide the feedback that these can be pulled into OI
(or if they should be avoided because of this and that, which needs to
be fixed).

On the organizational side, build an up-to-date information (or validate
existing one) about constructing the distro, including rebuilds of the
kernel, userspace and 3rd-party (SFE) software. And get some process in
place to more regularly roll out package updates and live-media distro
images. After all, OI is largely just one of many methods to package
common software, which other distros fulfil with their methods. There
is likely some code unique to OI (such as, perhaps, the installer and
its default behavior, or the GUI-related things mostly absent from the
server-oriented distros), but much of the kernel and updated utilities
RTI'd recently are common with the upstreams (illumos-gate et al).

Here's my thoughts on this,
//Jim Klimov