[OpenIndiana-discuss] Firefox and newcomers

[Nikola M.]

On 10/15/14 04:27 AM, bentahyr at chez.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm jumping in as the activity seems to increase after the bash bug lately and there's a will to organise things.
>
> I see a lot of people requesting Firefox and other Mozilla softwares, just to to make sure everyone is aware that Mozilla still provides binaries for Solaris platforms :
>
> ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest-esr/contrib/

Those are actually Oracle-contributed builds to Mozilla, for Opensolaris 
and S10 that are working on Openindiana, but yes. I am using those and 
they are OK.
>
> And they work very well with a9 (except the limited amount of plugins available especially the ad blockers).
>
> Now as I've been using more and more a9 as a base I would like to know what is/would be the process to get involve in testing as you guys want to test things and to publish newer version of packages for various applications.
Currently there is a process of making sense of a development model and 
new developers are needed.

2 tasks to resolve first are making sense of Hipster wild and crazy 
update model in line with tested and released model of /dev:

Making update from /dev to numbered versions of Hipster 'entire' to work 
(requires that Hipster soon get numbered entire versions)
Making updatemanager and packagemanager work (required to release next 
/dev out of it)

See if you can describe yourself on oi-NewDevs mailing list and also on 
[oi-dev] list.

> As I'm a console user, I have elinks, mutt and other standard tools like these in recent version recompiled with Sunstudio 12.3 as much as I can and I started to play with gcc 4.9.1 to some extend.
>
> So yes... to sum up :
> 1 - If I want to provide some application in packaged form and submit them to "OI", how should I do that ?
> 2 - If I want to help for testing things without "moving to hipster" how should I do that ? (vbox, zones)
>
> As soon as there are clear process for these 2 things, it should be easier for people to jump in and contribute.
OI currently has split-brain problem
where some people are forcing rolling release model, without versioning 
updates to it and no testing at all and no releases, but snapshots in 
form of Hipster ISO.

Other way around is to put your effort in making new /dev release that 
is stalled for a long time.

It requires aether changing Hipster to be more in line with updating 
from /dev and making new /dev out of it,
or cherry picking and/or making new project for making new /dev like 
Hipster project is,
only with more sane goals of actually have /dev releases.

You can _not_ move to Hipster anymore. It is locked by constant updates 
and for not caring to fix things in Hipster, that block updating. An for 
not caring of Hipster regarding any release cycle and creating 
distribution-making rules etc...

Yes, you are right, not having answers to those 2 question could be messy.

I suggest you take a look at the Openindiana Wiki, take a look where 
sources are , see what hardware capabilities you have and start building 
things yourself.
And then you can come back with more sane answer and put it in the wiki 
if you haven't already found it :)

I personally was under impression that someone else would pick up 
Hipster changes to make new /dev and that was why I was using Hipster 
for a year and was reporting bugs and showstoppers on IRC.
It proved that "no one's there" who can pick it up and make a new /dev 
by cherry-picking from it
and my testing effort was almost in vain, since there was no exact bug 
reporting and fixing procedure for Hipster.
As I understand now, insisting on Hipster model as it is now is almost 
complete waste of time.

Try to build package and publish it locally. Once you tested it, 
announce it on oi-dev mailing list and see from there.
There is also SFE (Spec Files Extra) project with a lot of packages, too.