[oi-dev] Where should SPARC go?

[Gary Mills]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 10:56:11PM +0100, Michal Nowak wrote:
> On 11/17/19 10:39 PM, Gary Mills wrote:
> > I have a series of questions to ask the members of this mailing list.
> > I have information to share with you as well.  I already have partial
> > answers to most of the questions, but I'd still like to hear from you.
[...]
> There were 7 contributors to the OpenIndiana/oi-userland repo (which is the
> bulk of OpenIndiana development) with more than 10 commits for the 2019.10
> release. I don't know how many OI users (be it long-term or accidental ones)
> are out there for the same period of time but I guess it's in low hundreds.

I have no doubt that SPARC owners are in the minority.  My estimate is
about 12 users and 6 developers.

> Although I consider Gary's OI on SPARC an interesting achievement, I doubt
> there are enough potential users and developers to sustain any illumos SPARC
> distro of the same (slow) pace of hipster development. E.g. looking at
> SPARC-related work in illumos, it's only Peter who contributes significantly
> to this area (mostly by removing entirely obsolete platforms and by ensuring
> illumos actually builds - and that's, I am afraid, revealing).

That's partly because illumos already has SPARC support built in:
Peter only fixes things in illumos that are broken.  I've submitted 14
bug reports, with patches, to the OI project.  I'm aware that the
patches need to be turned into PRs before OI developers will consider
them.  Most of the bug reports are not SPARC-specific.  I did not need
to submit any bug reports to the illumos project.

> Given the tiny resources OI project has and can offer, I wish OI and
> "OI"-for-SPARC were independent and related to each other in the same way OI
> currently relates to OmniOS CE and pkgsrc, that is by sharing knowledge,
> patches.

Full independance is a good way to cripple SPARC development.  OI
source archives, Makefiles, and package manifests are used to build
and publish OI SPARC packages, generally with no change.  It's OI all
the way.  The only thing that will change is the list of components to
build.  The package names are the same.  The package repository does
not have to be hosted by OI, of course.

I've had a few offers of a build server with jenkins.  It will clone
oi-userland periodically, and build packages from it.  Only the binary
packages will be different from the x86 version.  The whole thing could
be fully automated and will track OI pretty closely.  We are not there
yet, but we will be.


-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-