[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

Deano deano at rattie.demon.co.uk
Sat Jan 15 21:16:20 UTC 2011


Guido wrote

> You seem to have a misconception of how the OI project operates.
> The current situation is that the largest part of maintenance
> work for all consolidations except ON is still done by Oracle
> although consolidation maintainers add fixes on top of that where
> they deem it necessary. And we might take advantage of that as long
> as it is feasible.
Even if those consolidations aren't what is best for OI?

At moment it's very hard to use OI in production because the consolidations
bring in lots of unnecessary packages and we haven't the resources to update
critical security of all those packages.

To me, long term route should be to bring the base consolidations OI
requires under OI control (likely a small set of server based ones), support
those 100% and have optional less supported ones from the rest of the
consolidations from Oracle and other sources.

However as the old saying goes, easier said than done :) I've already
volunteered to work on minimal JeOS/debootstrap level of OI, so I guess I'll
find out how much work is involved heh

At heart I guess it's what OI is and wants to be, is it a free clone of
Oracle Solaris or is it a independent OS, just with the Sun heritage? This I
suspect is much easier for me, as I have no history with Sun or Oracle (Been
20 years since I used a Sun OS and they aren't fond memories). I just see OI
as an awesome engineered Unix OS that I prefer over Linux or BSD for lots of
reason that I'm sure most on this list would agree with, its heritage is
just that for me, a past with good and bad points but control of its destiny
should be its own.

Going back to the original proposal, a stable cut focused OI with security
and critical updates is part of building that destiny. It's a stake in the
ground, that illumos and OI are an OS you can use now and in the future
regardless of what happens outside its control. It may not be, at this
stage, everything to all, *but* it as a real thing, that people can use as a
production server OS.

Bye,
Deano 






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