[oi-dev] oi_151a9 roadmap & planning

[Peter Tribble]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Alasdair Lumsden <alasdairrr at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> TribbliX was a for fun desktop-oriented distro (correct me if I'm wrong)
> by someone that hates IPS and loves SVR4 packaging. I got the impression
> Peter never seemed to want to help OI out directly because of the IPS issue.
>

That's partially true, but not entirely. It's true that I hate IPS,
part of that is emotional and psychological scars that will
probably never heal, and they run deep.

I have no particular love for SVR4 - it's there, it's compatible with
every other Solaris system I run, it's good enough (unlike IPS), it
doesn't suffer from the crippling technical limitations of IPS, and
I'm sufficiently familiar with it that I can use it with zero effort. For a
hobby distro, minimizing effort is paramount. Had I come from
a different background, I might have chosen rpm or dpkg.

Tribblix is definitely for fun, and has the advantage that I completely
understand the needs of its target audience. (Currently, just me.)
Desktop orientation is a reflection of current state rather than future
intentions, though.

People naturally work on different things in different ways. If there's
a net benefit to working together (and there are always costs to doing
so - whether that be making a commitment, surrendering control, fitting
in to alien processes, or having to support something you're opposed to)
then people will do so; it gets much harder if there isn't a net benefit.

I decided that the amount of effort I would have to expend to make
another distro do what I want was far higher than the effort
needed to directly build it from scratch, and I was right on that.
And, just as importantly, I learnt far more from doing so than I
would have otherwise.

I suspect that there will always be multiple distros - we have multiple
packaging systems, variant desktop philosophies, appliance vs
server vs desktop vs general-purpose. The real focus ought to be
illumos, and any distro adds to the overall ecosystem.

Strengthening that ecosystem ought to be the goal, not picking
a winning distro or forcing people with different aims and objectives
to toe some common party line. In many ways, much of that work
needs to be done outside our own community - by working with
other communities to strengthen their support of illumos/Solaris
based systems.

(Ideally, you want other communities to build and distribute software
for you. That's one area where IPS is a huge obstacle - all this
repository stuff is an intolerable burden on third parties, pushes you
in the direction of central control and bottlenecks, and discourages
the long tail of drive-by contributors that is key to successful
projects. [See what Linus was talking about recently, although
that was about the problems with CLAs. Same issue of reducing
barriers to participation, though.])

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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