[oi-dev] Salt Project maintenance and future

[Marcel Telka]

Hi all,

The Salt, or Salt Project <https://saltproject.io>, also known as
SaltStack is packaged for OpenIndiana as system/management/salt.  It is
currently at version 3007.1.

This version was released by upstream in May 2024.  The latest upstream
version of Salt is 3007.8 released in September 2025.

In 2023-2024 I updated Salt few times in our repo, but since I do not
use it (and I never used it) I've no idea if it works or not.  Also, I
do not know if it is used by somebody at all.

The project itself does have several problems that make its maintenance
hard, for example:

- salt's testsuite fails early so it is unclear if the package works at
  all at OpenIndiana
- with almost every new upstream release the project brings several new
  dependencies that we need to package as well to make the salt
  installable
- some of these dependencies lacks illumos/Solaris support
- salt relies on some very old python modules that does not work
  properly with new Pythons

Because of that I think we do have only two options:

- somebody steps in to maintain our Salt package, or
- we obsolete and remove Salt from OpenIndiana:
  https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland/pull/24480

If you are using Salt at OpenIndiana and/or want to maintain it, please
let me know ASAP.


Thank you.

-- 
+-------------------------------------------+
| Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel at telka.sk  |
|                homepage: http://telka.sk/ |
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