[oi-dev] Where should SPARC go?

[Peter Tribble]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 8:43 PM Gary Mills <gary_mills at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> 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.
>

That's probably slightly low in terms of users. There are currently about 6
active
users of Tribblix for SPARC (other than myself). (For reference, there are
50-100
active users of Tribblix on x86.) I suspect the number would increase if
illumos on
SPARC were more mature.


> > 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.


It's not as if there's any hardware development going on that affects the
supported SPARC platforms. (Yes, it would be nice to support more current
hardware, but what we have is a static target.) Much of the cleanup work
that
I'm (very very slowly) doing is to try and reduce the blast radius of
changes
from x86.


> 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.
>

I wouldn't have expected full independence. I would have thought you want
your own fork of oi-userland, though, so you can make whatever local changes
necessary. One thing I'm finding is that the chance of something building on
SPARC is going down over time, so I'm having to hold certain packages on
SPARC at older revisions.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openindiana.org/pipermail/oi-dev/attachments/20191124/4bfd605a/attachment-0005.html>