[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Shawn Walker]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Richard L. Hamilton <rlhamil at smart.net> wrote:
> > Ceri Davies wrote:
>  > > My point being that this is going to go down like a
>  [controversial expression deleted]
>
> >
>  > Hello, Ceri. That's really an unfortunate comment
>  > given the hard work
>  > many people have been putting into making this
>  > initial release
>  > successful. It's obviously a work in progress, and
>  > great strides have
>  > been made in a relatively short amount of time. Also,
>  > your comment is
>  > not acceptable for advocacy-discuss.
>
>  I do think it would be nice if a big high-visibility release was
>  accompanied by a _matching_ tarball of all the source (and
>  closed binaries, as applicable) and tools needed to rebuild it.
>  IMO, _that_, in if not _one_ wget, at least a _very_short_list_
>  of commands that fetches it all, corresponding to the release,
>  is what many people that are say 3/4 using and 1/4 trying
>  to fix/enhance/understand, might want.  With the caveat that
>  before they get too carried away, they might want to see if
>  whatever they want to do hasn't already been done in the latest&greatest,
>  and pointers like you gave to help them find same.
>
>  Or to put it another way, from an external perspective, I think the
>  process and information needed to set up a suitable build system and retrieve
>  all the bits suitable to (re)build a particular version, while somewhat documented,
>  need to be simpler, better documented, more visible, and more readily
>  perceived as transparent.  That holds both for recent releases subject to some
>  level of support, as well as the bleeding edge, IMO.

The primary issue with that, is that it really isn't practical to have
a single tarball of all the source.

OpenSolaris is comprised of numerous consolidations that each use
their own software build and management mechanisms.

The tarball would be gigabytes or larger in size and I'm not even sure
how you would organise it.

While many of the larger components do have well-documented build
systems, etc. I don't think it is practical, at this time, to expect
something unified.

With that said, one of the goals of the Distribution Community Group
is to see that as much documentation as possible is provided so that
others can build their own OpenSolaris distributions. So, you can look
forward to this documentation eventually being available. However, we
need volunteers to help produce it! I would invite anyone interested
to join the distribution-discuss mailing list and participate in the
Distribution CG.

Cheers,
-- 
Shawn Walker

"To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." -
Robert Orben