[oi-dev] State of development

[Alasdair Lumsden]

Strong leadership and a very very large investment in man-hours.

The problem with OI is the build and assembly of it, i.e. the "release
engineering". It's very difficult and very tedious as-is. Nobody wants to
do it. Well, almost nobody - Jon Tibble has taken this on, but given the
amount of work involved, I am not surprised progress has been slow.

The whole way the OS is built needs refactoring. At the moment there are a
large number of different build systems, "consolidations" in Sun parlance,
such as JDS (desktop), SFW (Sun Freeware), userland-gate, pkg5, xnv, etc
etc. This needs to all be reduced to one single easy to use build system
(ideally).

I attempted to do this with oi-build, which took the best build system
(userland-gate) and automated building with Jenkins (a continuous build
system). But oi-build got politicised, Nexenta wanted to collaborate with
OI on the userland, so oi-build became illumos-userland, which went
nowhere, and ended up pissing everyone off to the point people lost
interest and the whole thing died. Then I resigned.

I don't know what Jon Tibble's plans are, I think the last time I spoke
about it he favoured a slow movement of things into oi-build over time.
Perhaps that's a good place for contributors to get started.

I imagine people do want to contribute, and would, if they had an easy way
to do so, with documentation and guidance and a helping hand.


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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-- 
Alasdair Lumsden

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