[OpenIndiana-discuss] openindiana state

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Deano <deano at rattie.demon.co.uk> [2010-12-13 17:36]:
> Alan Wrote
> > That's partially inherited from OpenSolaris and Solaris before it.
> > 
> > No one at Sun ever built all the consolidations - each was done by its own
> > team and while we tried to have some coordination on things like a common
> > compiler version, we never worried about all the other details, and
> certainly
> > never designed a "make World" process or unified set of required packages
> > to build them all.
> 
> Hmm perhaps rather than complaining, I've found my first item to work on for
> OI :) Whilst people are paid to work on a code base, and can pop over to the
> build guru cubicle for a quick chat, complex builds aren't that much of a
> problem (well until you get told to update one...) but IMHO for open source
> projects, the lower the cost to entry the better.
> 
> I'm more than happy to have a go but whilst I have many years of experience
> with compilers and builds never before have I reached into Solaris country,
> so will likely have lots of stupid questions along the way.
> 
> The first set of which are perhaps the hardest to answer... Where to start?

If you look at http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Human+Resources you
see a number of consolidations and on
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Building+the+Operating+System
there are instructions how to build them. Apart from that we
could use more documentation and non-technical contributions such
as updating and filling the website with content, other marketing
etc.

> 
> I'll use myself as an example, as newbie use cases, for several areas I
> wanted/want to get my feet wet in.
> Use case 1:
> Wanted to make a small tighter build, as looking to take OI into production.
> Classic reduce the attack vector optimizations, for that I want to remove a
> whole bunch of stuff, kermel modules, drivers and applications. This is more
> of distribution issue rather than build environment issue, but a debootstrap
> style minimal install is a great place to start to create custom JEOSs. As
> OI is so new, the smaller its footprint in production the better whilst it
> stabilizes.

See http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+jeos/WebHome for
such an effort which had been started on OpenSolaris.

> 
> Use case 2: 
> Install fresh OI 147/148 and doesn't quite support a piece of hardware. So
> want to write/fix a driver. What should the package I download (IPS?)
> contain to allow me to do that? Is it purely enough to have a compileable
> Illumos environment? Or is Illumos itself fractured so that its better to go
> into Illumos first and make it work with a smallest set of requirements?
> Or... am I barking up the wrong tree? And driver writing is doable somehow
> else?

Writing drivers is out of scope for OpenIndiana, that should be
done within the Illumos project. Illumos can be built on OI, the
process of contributing to Illumos is described here:
http://www.illumos.org/projects/illumos-gate/wiki/How_To_Contribute

> Use case 3:
> Installed fresh OI 147/148 and want to compile and run latest version of
> popular open source programs (for example Nginx), perhaps port and optimize
> for the OI platform. This is I think already covered somewhat by the GNU
> packages but even that gets confusing as there are several and have pathing
> issues.

We have planned an extra consolidation where such packages could
be maintained later, it is just not ready yet. In the meantime
you could contribute packages to SFE which could later be
imported into the OI project, see my other mail for details.

-- 
Guido Berhoerster