[oi-dev] oi_151a9 roadmap & planning

Thu Feb 13 05:19:01 UTC 2014

I think the general idea is to get to a minimum criteria as basis for wider
collaboration.  We have to start small and manageable and agreeable. Then
others will follow if they see the benefits of that working together for a
healthier code and healthier community guidelines, then there will be lower
barriers for participation, more consensus-building and pooling together
the best solutions out there.

I am inviting Alasdair, Peter Tribble, Jörg Schilling and Martin Bochnig to
discuss this and find the best way forward in creating this smaller circle
to create greater trust and more support from within the
OpenSolaris-derived communities and the wider ecosystem.  The perks would
be participation of more stakeholders and better performance from healthy
code maintenance and less work for we know who does what where, this
further invites more hobbyist and professionals to devote their time if we
have a better framework. In a sense we need to build confidence in the core
technologies.

Thank you all for your response.  I am driving you to re-think. It is my
personal dream to see our community finally take off and overcome this
"heritage of missing collaboration" from Sun in illumos and OpenIndiana.

I am very positive about future collaboration with UNIX lovers so we can
evolve the best UNIX ever.

Sincerely yours,

Seth Nimbosa, your Brother and Comrade-in-Arms

http://twitter.com/nimbosa
FB.com/nimbosa

 ---------- ** * ** ----------

* Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work*
*and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for -*

*in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car,and
the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.  *

  - Ellen Goodman

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 4:41 AM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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/
>
______________________________
_________________
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 9:42 PM, Joerg Schilling <
Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de>
 wrote:

The problem with OpenIndiana is that it is a continuation project for "Sun
Indiana". Sun Indiana however (if ignoring the IPS issue) has been created
using my project proposal for a community based distro I send to Sun in
2005.
Sun did take the ideas from the proposal but did not collaborate...

OpenIndiana for this reason has a heritage of missing collaboration. It
needs
to be restructured in order to prevent contradictions with other distros in
order to allow collaboration.

> XStreamOS, DilOS, Schillix etc all have their own goals and agendas, and
> again, have no interest in collaborating.

I cannot speak for the other distros, but SchilliX definitely is interested
in
collaboration once possible partners do not act in a way that prevents
collaboration. Note that I am trying to support collaboration since
September
2004 and definitely since June 17 2005 when SchilliX was published as the
first
OpenSolaris based distro.

What do we need for collaboration?

Well....

-       IPS must not be the only packaging

-       /usr/gnu must not be the default first entry in PATH

-       /sbin/sh may be a link to the Bourne Shell

-       scripts need to be open for being able to mount /usr using
        the Bourne Shell.

-       We need to find a way for versioned libraries to support
        as much binary compatibility as possible.

Jörg

 ---------- ** * ** ----------

* Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work*
*and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for -*

*in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car,
and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.  *

  - Ellen Goodman

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 4:41 AM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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