>>>>> "re" == Richard Elling <rich...@nexenta.com> writes:
re> we would very much like to see Oracle continue to produce
re> developer distributions which more closely track the source
re> changes.
I'd rather someone else than Oracle did it. Until someone else is
doing the ``building'', whatever that entails all the way from
Mercurial to DVD, we will never know if the source we have is complete
enough to do a fork if we need to.
I realize everyone has in their heads, FORK == BAD. Yes, forks are
usually bad, but the *ability to make forks* is good, because it
``decouples the investments our businesses make in OpenSolaris/ZFS
from the volatility of Sun and Oracle's business cycle,'' to
paraphrase some blog comment.
Particularly when you are dealing with datasets so large it might cost
tens of thousands to copy them into another format than ZFS, it's
important to have a >2 year plan for this instead of being subject to
``I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.''
Nexenta being stuck at b134, and secret CVE fixes, does not look good.
Though yeah, it looks better than it would if Nexenta didn't exist.
IMHO it's important we don't get stuck running Nexenta in the same
spot we're now stuck with OpenSolaris: with a bunch of CDDL-protected
source that few people know how to use in practice because the build
procedure is magical and secret. This is why GPL demands you release
``all build scripts''!
One good way to help make sure you've the ability to make a fork, is
to get the source from one organization and the binary distribution
from another. As long as they're not too collusive, you can relax and
rely on one of them to complain to the other.
Another way is to use a source-based distribution like Gentoo or BSD,
where the distributor includes a deliverable tool that produces
bootable DVD's from the revision control system, and ordinary
contributors can introspect these tools and find any binary blobs that
may exist.
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