[oi-dev] State of development

Tue Apr 16 14:41:27 UTC 2013

Thanks for your words, Alasdair,

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

 > 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.

Absolutely yes !!!

I hope the effort will continue. I'm just one of the users of OI, and I'm surely wanted to 
contribute, and give some (even not big) amount of my time back to the project. But I have no 
experience with OI build. Surely a helping hand and some doc is appreciated. I think other people 
are in the same kind of situation. If the global effort is positive, it's a win.

My usage is in infrastructure servers (DNS, MTA, proxy, web server, ...), and I usually compile 
myself all needed software. So I need just a basic OS. My requirements are at some low level but I'm 
used with the "OI way".

Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
>
> 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 <mailto: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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