[OpenIndiana-discuss] No longer using OI Desktop

[David Brodbeck]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Apostolos Syropoulos via
openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:

> The real problem is that OI has no community---just people who contribute
> almost nothing (of course there are brilliant exceptions...) and who are
> always critical about this and about that.


I think partly this is because there's a very high barrier to entry.  For
example, last I heard building the complete system from source still
required access to a closed-source, non-publicly-available compiler.
Documentation is scattered and much of it is out of date. I can see why a
new user, even one with coding experience, wouldn't want to wade into
that.  The situation is slowly improving, but it's starting from a culture
where builds were handed down from an elite few, and that takes time to
change.  (Partly this is also a difference between the "cathedral" model
vs. the "bazaar" model.  A lot of what makes OI and FreeBSD attractive in
terms of consistency and stability comes from the cathedral model, which
also tends to result in slower development.)


> As about the drivers, why don't you work on the new driver?


Kernel drivers are a pretty esoteric area in any OS, and doubly so in OI.
I don't think there have been very many community changes to the drivers
handed down from Oracle.

-- 
D. Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington
GPG key fingerprint: 0DB7 4B50 8910 DBC5 B510 79C4 3970 2BC3 2078 D875