[OpenIndiana-discuss] abandoned support for OpenOffice, Miozilla Firefox, Adobe Flash, etc.

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-02-10 05:47, Reginald Beardsley wrote:
> Not everything in the OpenIndiana repositories is up to date.  That doesn't mean that newer releases won't run.  It just reflects that the people working on OI have other priorities than solving problems that have simple solutions.

Speaking of external repositories which already have working distros
(like firefox contrib) - how difficult or conceptually wrong would it
be to make a recipe for SFE or similar repository to just pull tarballs
and make IPS manifests to suit their file/dir contents according to a
template? This way once a new "recompilation" of the package is run by
a repo maintainer, with little to no manual work the new FF contrib
tarball becomes a commonly updateable IPS package? Would any opensource
licenses forbid such sort of redistribution, BTW?

As for closed-source - like the Adobe implementation of Flash - there
is little we can do short of complaining to the commercial organization
who sees this platform uninteresting and not worth the investments
(and they have any right and even obligation to stakeholders to do
as they see fit for profit), or emulating an environment they still
support (via the lx brand, or wine, or whatever might happen to do
the job), or maybe adopting an opensource flash renderer.

> I've not used it myself, but as I understand, OI is already able to run Linux codes in branded zones. So I think you're asking for something that was done some time ago.  I typically build from source code and rarely encounter problems doing that. It also means I have no reason to run Linux binaries.

I believe, this support was ripped out in late days of OpenSolaris, and
there is a project to add it back (reverting that change), see here:

http://os-solaris.ru/en/patch-k-illumos-dlya-vosstanovleniya-lx-brand/

That team makes a number of other interesting things for illumos/OI,
so their blog is worth a look around ;)

I've only tried lx brand in its maiden days, and it emulated a specific
linux-2.4.x kernel, allowing to install a CentOS 3 (IIRC) userspace
image. That did work, and we used it for some POC projects to host
linux-only proprietary programs on Solaris.

I haven't tried the patch linked above, but according to their blog,
they can run linux Skype with it, so it seems pretty useful to this day.

The main drawback, which led to scrapping of the project, was that it
could not be maintained to support emerging newer linux features - 2.6
or even 3.x now. I am not sure if it was so much a technical problem
or an organizational one (find someone to do the job), but IIRC it was
a GSoC offer one year...

> (...)It may be a stretch goal, but I expect you can do it if you make the requisite effort.

Above there are a couple of ideas to try out - see if the LX brand is
still recoverable, and maybe RTI it back into the illumos common code
or OI source, and hopefully begin updating it to emulate more modern
linux distros too :)

You can also take a look at turning tarballs into IPS packages, which
should be a simplified half of existing recipes to turn source tarballs
into compiled code and then into packages - and there are plenty of
such example recipes in terms of SFE project and spec-files. This idea
might be applied to solve many peoples' complaints about an up-to-date
firefox, thunderbird, OOO/LO, which is a big share of complaints about
OI being or moving towards "obsolete"...

Thanks,
//Jim Klimov

PS: and yes, there are "armchair specialists" who can devote some
time to directing what they think others should do, but due to other
real-life obligations can't (at least myself, for now) spare more
time to actually do useful stuff. There's only so many non-workers
a community can stand with just a little annoyed grumble. Please
don't become one of the discuss-only people (for long) ;)