[OpenIndiana-discuss] Future of OI

Sat Dec 8 01:08:41 UTC 2012

Hi,
your email just arrives when I am having some thoughts about the future of
OI but my conclusions are quite different. I have to admit that I am in no
way an accomplished sys admin or system developer but a researcher with
extensive practice of night of programming accompanied with beer and pizza
(cliché).

Considering the amazing work that Alasdair Lumsden, Jon Tibble, Ken Mays,
Milan Jurik, Alex Viskovatoff and many others... have been carried out and
are still doing, it seems to me that a slowed down development does not
involve necessarily switching instantly (like changing between 15 mp3
players in command line) especially since any unstable OI has been more
polished than any stable Ubuntu I've been using at work.
Maybe this is rather time to rethink OpenIndiana a bit to move to a next
phase.

This phase could be simply more community involvement.

I seem to understand that managing all the consolidations inherited from
Sun is quite heavy and from what I read from Alasdair "hard to chew" and so
far considering the limited manpower compared to other project the
progresses are considerable.

Nevertheless it seems that there is a substantial user base, which could
contribute in many ways if they are provided a common "sandbox".

I wrote few emails in the past days talking about setting up some Redmine
website at openindiana.org (like the good old hub. ) where a "Packaging
community" project could serve as a bridge between users/external
developers and OI developers and the pkgbuild-SFE team, by:
- submitting request for review new spec files,
- submitting bug reports,
- writing documentation,
- giving pointers to projects related to OI and Illumos (like this valgrind
port for Solaris compatible systems).

Another "Project community" could serve as a front end for project
proposals: I have two things in mind that I want to implement for instance,
providing a pkgbuild-SFE environment using IPS (so that people can compile
from source with the same environment ) and modifying the Device Driver
Utility to feed a database with supported hardware (HCL strikes back).

One outcome could be that new contributors could help for the SFW and
Add-on consolidation and lower the workload on main OI developers: focus on
production grade quality for the core server and provide community
supported desktop consolidations (testing-grade then).

As I mentioned, I am not myself in the IT/Computer Sciences industry but
rather a rather experienced user, C++/Python programmer for applied maths
who has worshiped the SUN and non-SUN developers behind OSOL since
2005/2006 ;) (unfortunately at that time I had a PhD to get done.)

I started contributing to SFE just now with the aim of developing packaging
of scientific software for OI: I have already MPI implementations, linear
solvers, Scilab in progress, Paraview, TexLive 2012 in progress, some R
packages that I am testing following from a discussion a week ago on this
list. It's going really fast: tomww, Ken Mays and Logan Bruns have been
really helpful and wrote notes that could be a starting point for tutorials.

This specific domain (scientific software) is just one example. If this
kind of "packaging community" others could gain visibility and help the SFE
team to move forward, it will help the community in a broader sense to
develop a more formalized packaging cycle.

On the other side I think OI is a really good entry point for "niche"
applications of Illumos like SmartOS and Nexenta: maybe I am mistaken, but
synergies look like a good thing on the papers.
People I know, develop on an OS they can install on a workstation or a
laptop: dismissing completely Desktop looks suicidal.

If OI developers are interested as well as other users on this mailing
list, and if we have the opportunity to host a "community hub" and little
by little move forward to more community (i.e every OI user).
I know that Illumos has that but OI needs its own platform to function.

So if people are interested I am willing to implement this: setup this
portal, write any possible documentation, port software, create this
scientific project as a first shot and see if it works out... etc...

This proposal as you have understood is not meant to change the way OI
developers work and the SFE team works but more like open a door, allow
easier code/spec reviews on Redmine, avoid duplicate work (packaging, bugs
solving, documentation) and better interaction between users/developers and
the team who has accomplished so much in the past 2 years.

Sorry for the long email. I will be happy to help in any way and if my
humble proposal finds some echo, I will be glad to start working on
possible solutions.

Best regards,

Aurélien

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Dec 2012, alka wrote:
>
>  hi all
>>
>> Currently  i use and recommend OI as the main ZFS/Illumos based platform-
>> but its more than obvious that the future development is stalled.
>>
>
> What causes you to believe that future development is stalled?
>
> I am a couple of minor updates behind (on u5 rather than u7) but the
> update manager says that there are over 900 packages to be updated. That
> does not feel like "stalled" to me.
>
> Bob
> --
> Bob Friesenhahn
> bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/**
> users/bfriesen/ <http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/>
> GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss@**openindiana.org<OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> http://openindiana.org/**mailman/listinfo/openindiana-**discuss<http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss>
>

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