I just have a small suggestion. Whatever distribution we make, please
make available packages like FreeBSD ports or Debian. That's the only
way we can make it more popular with Admins and new users.
Ashish Nabira
Enterprise IT Architect
Email ashish.nab...@sun.com
On 16-Sep-10, at 1:28 PM, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
Ok, I understand your point. And it is cool with you
being first with several things.
I am only asking if all distros cooperated on one
single distro, would it not be better if there was
only one "official" community distro. It does not
matter to people if it is Schillix or OpenIndiana, as
long as the distro attracts many core developers and
it gets momentum. But some people would prefer a pure
OpenSolaris distro, and not an entirely new animal.
I understand there are lots of efforts invested in
each distro and lot of politics too. I am just
worried about fragmentation. Just like Unix: there
are Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO, Xenix, etc. And they
could not be merged, Unix continued to be fragmented.
And then suddenly Linux came and everyone joined it.
I am worried it will be the same with OpenSolaris:
lots of different distros and no one catch momentum.
But with a sader end: there is no single OpenSolaris
distro to emerge, but all these distros die instead.
I think OpenSolaris community is not really
interested in umpteen different distros, as Linux
has. Only one distro is acceptable to most people. I
believe. But of course, people are free to disagree.
:o)
Well...there are probably people that prefer for example
* traditional Solaris command set default vs GNU command set default
* GNOME vs KDE (I'd still go with CDE, but it's not going forward and
non-redistributable)
* SVR4 packages vs IPS vs whatever packaging scheme Nexenta uses
(there too there's a problem, inasmuch as other tools like beadm and
zonecfg
are also involved, although I gather it ought to be possible to come
up with
different versions of them for each packaging scheme that some distro or
another uses)
If one wants to keep maximum compatibility with OpenSolaris/Solaris 11
(Express),
then I suppose one had better grit one's teeth and accept IPS. But
the rest
might well be handled mostly with additional packages for alternative
command set(s) or GUIs.
But don't forget that the most commercial (i.e. developers that do it as
their day job) distro outside of Oracle is probably Nexenta, and they
do Debian-based packaging and command set.
So while one might be able to have one distro that tries to be the open
successor to OpenSolaris (allowing most of the added value effort to be
directed to additional packages rather than distro building),
collaboration
should exist at the level of the common source elements (i.e. Illumos,
as
an openly maintained ON consolidation) as well as at the distro
maintenance
level.
That way, when Oracle eventually releases some commercial product
and subsequently dumps a bunch of code updates over the wall,
everyone can work together to merge the code updates. Failing to
collaborate there would be one of the places where there would
otherwise be a huge duplication of effort. But the result probably
would have to be incorporated into a distro to be tested, and I can't
see there being less than two basic distros: OpenIndiana (or something
like it, as the open successor to the OpenSolaris distro) and
NexentaCore;
since both of those variants have a base of people using it not just for
a home NAS or something, but for serious purposes (i.e. something that
would lose money if it didn't work).
--
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