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

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 30.12.20 um 21:14 schrieb 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
>
Just to add to my former answer:

What OI is not lacking is management, good ideas, recommendations. But
what we are lacking is

- Infrastructure: we only have a single build VM provided by EveryCity,
who started OI but abandoned it in favour of SmartOS. We also only have
a single package server provided by them.
    Thus, there are big obstackles to test things. This is hard for the
maintainers and hard for the users or anybody who wants to contribute
but lacks knowledge to be able to care for packages.
- Helpers of any kind: testers, documentors, maintainers, developers.
This is partly due to the lack of infrastructure, partly due to the fact
that former maintainers have been overworked
    and got frustrated.

I am also thinking about abandoning OI Hipster quite often. But then I
look at the alternatives: FreeBSD, GhostBSD, NetBSD and some more. And
then I always come to the conclusion:
OI is still better for me, because for everything that I miss on OI
there is something better on macOS than on any of the alternatives.
OI just fills the gaps I have with macOS: security (privateness),
robustness and some (home) server usages. Furthermore, if I really want
somethings I can try to build and package it for OI.
This is how I started to become an active member: First, I cared for
nodejs on OI, then I added simple things I wanted to have, like
JetBrains Mono. It took some time and efforts
to become familiar with OI's build system, though.

Andreas