[OpenIndiana-discuss] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

[Dave Miner]

On 01/17/11 05:44 AM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
> Hi Gabriel,
>
> On 01/17/11 10:07 AM, Gabriel de la Cruz wrote:
>> Thanks!
>> A place to start is a place to start, and an stable server release is
>> the most urgent one among all the other options.
>
> Great - thanks for the feedback!
>
>> Some people is talking about the server-desktop question, I
>> particularly liked the old Solaris software groups concept (reduced
>> network, core, end user, entire)... woulnt it be posible to have a non
>> stable distro featuring the full range of up to date software, and a
>> stable conservative one (behind in innovation but ahead in stability)
>> allowing to either just keep the fully suported core of software or to
>> add as well a less supported desktop enviroment?. Wouldnt this be
>> almost same effort, example:
>
> Well, the thing is, this is already the case. All people have to do is
> use the Text Installer ISO (Or the Automated Installer ISO) - this
> installs a much smaller subset of software which doesn't include the
> full Gnome desktop software. Effectively the text installer ISO is the
> "server release" and the Live CD ISO is the "desktop release". Perhaps
> we need to name them such to avoid the confusion, as it seems a lot of
> people on-list are confused about this.
>
> Unfortunately the Text Installer still installs quite a "fat" install,
> due to some packaging that needs improvement. Alan Coopersmith pointed
> us at some bugs on bugs.opensolaris.org related to this which was pretty
> helpful:
>
> http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7010355
> - splitting tk bindings out of the core python package
>
> http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7010324
> - splitting X apps out of the core groff package
>
> http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6574610
> - splitting glib out of the gnome-base-libs package
>
> The only differences between a server install and a desktop install are
> the packages installed, and they're already split up into fairly
> reasonable incorporations. I think the situation with OpenSolaris only
> having a graphical LiveCD for so long has led people to think that
> OpenSolaris and thus OpenIndiana is mainly a desktop OS.
>
> So I am starting to think that we should rename the Live CD to
> OpenIndiana-Desktop and the Text Installer to OpenIndiana-Server.
>
> Ideally the graphical installer, Caiman, would let you choose which
> package incorporations to install. But unfortunately I think it does a
> "dumb" install from a cpio archive.
>
> Perhaps refactoring of Caiman is needed, where the Live CD ships with a
> pkg repo, starts a pkg server, and does an install from that. Not sure
> how feasible this would be. Given how complete pkg is, probably not all
> that hard.
>

We looked into this a little quite some time ago.  The problem with 
doing IPS-based installation from CD's or DVD's is that IPS's data 
access patterns during package installation are relatively random, not 
streaming, and so you will get utterly abysmal installation performance 
(orders of magnitude worse than anything you've ever used) when using 
physical CD or DVD media.  That storage technology just isn't designed 
for random access.  This doesn't apply much if you're using an ISO image 
as a virtual CD or using USB flash memory media.

Dave