[oi-dev] State of development

Wed Apr 17 01:08:18 UTC 2013

Absolutely agree with both Alasdair's and Jose's words.

Obviously OI has an uphill struggle ahead, I think it's greatest 
problem, at least, at the moment, is lack of information for visitor's - 
especially first timers.

OI has by far the best 'presence' on the internet thanks to google and 
the remnants of OpenSolaris, but - whilst I have no problem with it - 
many will struggle to see any real activity/interest in the project.

For all it's worth, it might - for example - be worth have a 
suggested/guess-work 'RoadMap'..  Even if the dates / targets are pushed 
back every 3 months for another 3 months, at least it *looks* like 
someone is having a quick think about it and posting up the latest 
pushbacks :)

Anyway, for those contributing to it, thanks for all your efforts so far 
and I wish you all the best generally.

Myself, and others, will continue to potter along with the contributions 
that we can =]

Cya!

On 16/04/2013 15:41, Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz wrote:
>
> 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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