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

[Andy Fiddaman]

On Wed, 30 Dec 2020, Aur?lien Larcher wrote:

; I think merging both makes sense to gain momentum and stopping reinventing
; the wheel given the number of developers (us pulling from OmniOS and
; Dominik packaging stuff that we already have).

I wasn't originally subscribed to this list but I've caught up via the
archives. This reply will be out of the thread order since it's to a
message I was Ccd on.

As others have said, the two distributions are quite different, and while
there are a few areas where there is overlap, there aren't actually as many
as a lot of people seem to think.

Like a lot of the OmniOS developers, I work on OmniOS core because I need it
for my business. The core is small and has stable and long-term branches, with
structured releases that mostly do not require a reboot. I don't need a desktop
or any of the additional software.

My other work on illumos is mostly as a hobby and a way to learn, and
I generally do that work against upstream illumos-gate so that all
distributions benefit. Josh has already referred to the work I'm doing
to upgrade ksh93 (and make it easier to maintain in the future), but things
like adding support to gate for building with openssl 1.1, or improving support
for 64-bit PCI come under the same umbrella.

I see references to the OmniOS Extra repository from time to time and I think
it's worth clarifying what this is. It's one of several bolt-on repositories
for OmniOS that provides additional packages and it keeps itself to itself
under /opt/ooce as far as possible. It does not have stable branches and
doesn't have any of the guarantees that there are around OmniOS core. It was
originally created to hold the extra packages needed to build OmniOS itself,
and to run the infrastructure. Other packages have been added by the OmniOS
community, and sometimes as a direct request from users with a support
contract. In particular, it is not trying to be a massive package repository,
or to support a desktop environment. As an example, the few X11 libraries and
headers which were added to it are there solely to support building OpenJDK 11
for OmniOS core.

Speaking of OpenJDK 11, that's one recent example of the collaboration
that's already occurring. OmniOS picked up Peter's work on OpenJDK pretty much
as it was and integrated it to core. Gcc is another example - OmniOS benefitted
directly from the work that Aurelien did to update gcc in OpenIndiana and
that work is in the central https://github.com/illumos/gcc/ so it's there
for all distributions that want it. In the other direction, OpenIndiana has
integrated the updated IPS tooling with support for python3 from the OmniOS
repository, and the kvm and bhyve branded zones.

I don't speak for the rest of the OmniOS developers, or for the users, but I
don't personally think it makes sense to try and merge the two distributions.
They are different and have different goals and there is not that much overlap
at the core.

Andy