[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-05-10 13:43, Andrzej Szeszo wrote:
> I agree with what Peter and Garrett wrote earlier. OI is lacking a clear
> vision. It should be different than other illumos distros' as well to
> avoid duplicating work unnecessarily.
>
> I think, OI could be "illumos hacker distro", and:
>
> - carry on providing GUI support, good enough for illumos hackers to use
> it on their desktops/laptops
> - it could potentially be based on vanilla illumos-gate; few OI specific
> changes could be upstreamed or dropped
> - existing OI users should be able to do pkg update to get the latest bits
>
> Not radical or innovative at all. Different enough to what other distros
> are doing though (no GUI, own illumos-gate forks).

Are there many (any?) OI-private deviations from illumos-gate?
I thought it was built with the "vanilla kernel" already.

Also, being a "hacker desktop" distro with access to all other software
packages that are available to other distros does not change the fact
that OI can be used on servers as well - efficiently, with same kernel
capabilities, scaling ability, etc? The difference may be minute, such
as compile-time flags for optimizations, default tuning, administrative
models and "the proper way to do things" (i.e. zones in OI and SmartOS
are AFAIK quite different logical models).

Meaning, that while other distros might be more suitable and optimal
for production servers with a clearly pre-defined purpose, such as a
VM server or an app server or a storage server - built for that purpose,
OI might run a desktop or a "undefined-purpose" server with possibly
smaller efficiency but higher versatility, or admin-friendliness by
means of having same administrative interface as on his desk/lap-top
or just having the interface at the console of the only server in the
small office, etc... maybe :)

//Jim