[OpenIndiana-discuss] Merging OI + OmniOS? (And OpenZFS vs ZFS)

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 30.12.20 um 19:10 schrieb Kalle Anka via openindiana-discuss:
>   I have a problem with my mail list settings, so I write one single reply, adressing three different persons. I am a newbie to the OpenSolarish scene, so I dont know much about it, or who the people we should talk to, though. :)
>
> @Aurelien,Yes, I was quite certain I was not alone in seeing the disadvantages of having separate small teams instead of one single larger team. It is good that you people already had this discussion. Maybe it is time to revive your old discussion again?
> It was not diplomatic to say that OI was inferior, but now some additional water has passed under the bridge and you all have had some time to work and deliver your own product. I think that if people were more diplomatic it would benefit OpenSolarish, and the world as a whole. We dont want a cursing and yelling culture as in some other OSes no?
> I dont understand your statement of no vanilla illumos anymore. Is OmniOS not illumos, but OI is? In that case, that is sad, yes. But in the greater scheme of things, it would be better for OpenSolarish community even if we have to give up vanilla illumos. If we merge OI and OmniOS, it is not irrecoverable, it will be possible later to try to tweak our new distro to a more vanilla illumos distro. Or, if someone in the future, did the additional minor work to tweak the new merged distro to vanilla illumos - that would be much less work than creating OI today, I guess?
>
> I bet many more than I, would be very excited in one unified illumos distro where we merge OmniOS and OI. I understand there is lot of prestige involved, but if we dont do want OpenSolaris to diminish and die to Linux, we all maybe should put aside the prestige? :)
>
>
> @Andy,Regarding who will do all the work. Realistically, it will be you and the other OI devs who will do all the work. I bet several other people would love to help, but not all of us can do what you can do. I want to help though. Maybe help to coordinate, and help discuss with the OmniOS team? And write manuals? Of course, if we can merge OI and OmniOS there will be lot of work for you guys in the beginning. But in the long run your work will be less as there are more developers involved. And as you guys already have discussed this earlier, maybe it is time to rethink this old train of thought of yours, again? You know the process better now and have a shipped product, so you do stand on your own legs. A large team of talented developers is better than a small team? This would also cause some attention in the FOSS world, and the OpenSolarish community. More people will be exposed to your work, and benefit from it. There are already lot of work done by OmniOS, you and the OI devs could leverage their work? What is your thought of working with a new set of talented developers creating something new together that we all could benefit from? Is there too much prestige involved for this to be realistic?
Most OI maintainers are "dormant" at the moment. I have been the only 
active member with commit rights for roughly three months now.
We don't even have enough people to test important things, eg. I have 
asked to test and look at an update of bind without any reaction for 
almost two weeks now.

Adding a desktop on top of OmniOSce is A LOT OF WORK. Maintaining a 
desktop is quite more complex than focussing on the server aspects of an 
OS alone. The amount of work that is already done
for OI (many parts of it inherited from OpenSolaris) is tremendous. If 
"we" start this endeavour it will most probably mean that you won't see 
anything in months if not years.
In my eyes it will kill OI and in the end will leave Tribblix as the 
only illumos based desktop OS.

I haven't been involved in the earlier discussions but only read the 
messages then. I just started to be more active at that time and didn't 
feel experienced enough to take part at the discussion.
Today I am not sure whether a unification would be a good idea. Not 
because I don't want to work with the OmniOSce guys but because we have 
different interests. Sure, we share some technologies,
like illumos, the boot loader and IPS. But OmniOSce is targeted as a 
server OS because that's the only area where people are willing to pay 
for things. OmniOSce is a product of some companies
while OI is an all-purpose OS with a desktop created by people in their 
spare time without any monetary interests (at least to my knowledge).
OmniOSce paying customers won't pay more to get a desktop and I don't 
expect that they will get many new paying desktop users. So there 
wouldn't be much to win for OmniOSce.

Andreas