[OpenIndiana-discuss] Down to earth roadmap

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-02-22 10:23, Stefan Müller-Wilken wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I think the whole support discussion might be futile. Let's face it, OI does not have the backing commercial organization others have. But so didn't Linux in its beginnings. The rules for using OpenIndiana in a professional environment are clear and  everyone can decide if lacking commercial support is acceptable or not. But then, this is where it has its strength: as long as OI stays close to Solaris, one can use it with any project - even no-budget ones - and decide where to cross border and shell out real money. And still be able to keep and apply grown experience, processes, procedures.

I believe, for the sake of the ecosystem in general, it would be
great if someone took it to port the security patches made in other
distribution projects for common third-party software, to update
the set of baseline package versions, etc. And I think there are
people who do some of these works already, although they might
clearly need more hands - there is just too much compatible
software to even look over the list of names within a month :)

The trick is about doing it as THE full-time primary job - with
enough financial output as to pay taxes and feed a family.

That is, while the results of work would be shared with the users
who are not required to pay (and we are not quite in a technical
nor political situation to enforce anyone to pay for such updates),
the people who do this work for more than an hour a week should
get some noticeable reward so that they can continue doing it and
are motivated to do so. Especially so if they dedicate much time
to it and are not sponsored to do so by a day-job company which
earns its rewards elsewhere - if this patching *is* the day-job.

This would seemingly leave us with an "honorable system" - where
those who can pay do so, those who can work do so, and everybody
uses the result and the system prospers quickly. Or nobody pays,
few people work occasionally, and the system is lucky to survive.

>
> So, to bring the roadmap discussion to a more down-to-earth level: can anyone shed light on the current release strategy? What constitutes 'enough' progress to cut a prerelease, what defines a major release? Is there a decision body, a group or person that assigns tickets to pre- and major releases and decides when to stop?

Also, is there some required or sufficient amount of progress in
illumos-gate alone (i.e. Saso's new ZFS features, recent integrated
driver updates and generic features and bugfixes contributed by
many developers) to warrant creation of a new (pre-)release?

Or does it necessarily require some updates to unspecified software
in other gates (i.e. the said security patches for some third-party
software like Apache or Sendmail, ported from other distros, or
updated package versions like OpenSSL, etc.)?

As we can see from release notes, there is some mix of both:
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/oi_151a_prestable7+Release+Notes
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/oi_151a+Release+Notes

Maybe there is (or should be) a release feature matrix like this:
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/oi_151

Or does this all mostly depend on a certain singular person's
judgement, available time and good will - so he picks a moment
to cut the Live ISO/USB images and push a version-bumped set of
packages into the well-known IPS repo?

>
> And even more concrete: would Illumos' bug tracker be the right place to define goals and track progress or would some sort of trac.openindiana.org be the way to go?

My 2c,
//Jim