[OpenIndiana-discuss] Parted on 2020.04 GUI LiveImage DVD: Huh???

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Sat, 27 Feb 2021 at 15:40, Reginald Beardsley via
openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
> Shipping a broken instance of gparted has resulted in my taking a hard look at FreeBSD as an alternative to OI.
> Shipping broken software is something I do not tolerate.
> I've been responsible for release management...
> This is not rocket science.
> You do *NOT* ship things that don't work!

Software will always have bugs, and I'm sorry to hear you're
experiencing issues.  The OpenIndiana community is relatively small,
and most if not all members are effectively volunteers.  Given that,
it is likely that you will need, on some level, to debug and fix parts
of the software that are not working the way you need them to work.

If you're not looking to get involved in the maintenance of the
software on some level, I suspect you would do better to look at
alternatives that provide a support plan that fits your needs, or at
least are backed by a much larger community with more spare capacity.
OmniOS, for example, is another illumos distribution for which
commercial support plans are available, though it does not provide a
desktop environment like OpenIndiana.

> I've run SunOS on my personal machines for almost 30 years starting with 4.1.1 on a 3/60.

Yes, you speak of it often.

> Both of the installers on the 2020.04 OI LiveImage failed to see the partition table and said that only 2 TB was accessible. I'm absolutely agog.

I'm not sure what's going on there, but I have no doubt it can be
debugged and fixed.  It's been a while since I've looked at the OI
installer myself, but I'm reasonably sure it creates logs you can
inspect.  The source is all available.  If you're using the text-mode
installer, for instance, I believe it's here:

    https://github.com/OpenIndiana/slim_source/tree/oi/hipster/usr/src/cmd/text-install

You can, I believe, also break out into a shell to have a look at what
the system has detected with respect to disks and partitions.

I believe just about everything shipped in OpenIndiana is built
through the oi-userland build system:

    https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland

They accept pull requests from community members who want to contribute fixes:

    https://github.com/OpenIndiana/oi-userland/pulls
    https://github.com/OpenIndiana/slim_source/pulls

> The fact that after going to the trouble of building OI when I wanted to fix the "format -e" SEGV issue
> I did not get any guidance from the dev lists on how to make it bootable does not incline me towards optimism.

If you're trying to build and test a change to packages that come from
illumos-gate, we have a guide in the official illumos project
documentation:

    https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/

If the guide doesn't work for you, we're definitely interested in
hearing about missing or incorrect information so that we can fix the
documentation.  It may also help to search the bug tracker for
existing bugs that match your symptoms, as well:

    https://www.illumos.org/projects/illumos-gate/issues

If you have a new bug, you're also welcome to file it!  Filing a bug
doesn't guarantee anybody will fix it, but _not_ filing bugs about
issues you hit almost certainly guarantees nobody will know about it.

I would recommend keeping things civil, as much as possible.  Remember
that the folks here are volunteers.  I totally understand that it's
frustrating when things are broken, but it's also really draining to
receive a lot of cranky e-mails.

Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org