[advocacy-discuss] [osol-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[Joerg Schilling]

Jon Trulson <jon at radscan.com> wrote:

> > It is obvious that if Sun calls a distro "OpenSolaris", many people believe
> > that this is the one and only.
> >
>
>    FWIW, as a third party that develops software on Solaris, I would
>    welcome an 'OpenSolaris Reference' distribution.

This would cause problems too.

It is better to define a binary compatibility guideline and to have a test 
for compatibility. We, the community of people who create distributions
in addition need to take care that this test is complete enough.

To understand this problem: If I did not push Sun to verify /usr/bin/tar 
against _my_ POSIX compliance test, Sun tar would still not create/read
POSIX.1-1988 compliant archives although it did pass the OpenGroup tests.


Note that if a distribution _adds_ this to the compatibility definitions,
this would make this distro unsuitable as a reference. For the same reason,
I need to correct you as I believe that believe that "Sun OpenSolaris" could 
be a reference distribution. "Sun OpenSolaris" would most likely include
more software than the reference requires and thus make it unsuitable as a 
reference. 

A reference distro has no less _and_ no more than the interface definition
and grants users that software compiled on that distro to run on any
other compatible distro.

Jörg

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