[advocacy-discuss] "What is OpenSolaris" page

[John Plocher]

Shawn Walker wrote:
> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:56 PM, John Plocher <John.Plocher at sun.com> wrote:
>> P1 bugs
>> =======
> ...
>> Hard coded and unchangeable preference/policy settings (PATH, SHELL, ...)
> 
> But these are changeable. They're all just settings in .bashrc, etc.
> What do you mean here?

If the GUI installer can only create new users with SHELL=bash,
or if the set of policy decisions that currently make SXCE
different from OpenSolaris2008.05 are not isolated into a
[set of] replaceable package[s], but instead coded directly
into things, ...

Remember, we are talking about a set of distros and repos in a
complete ecosystem - what may be great for your desktop distro
may be completely wrong for someone else's storage appliance or
my model train setup.  Or for an OpenSolaris Long Term Supported
Enterprise Release.

>> P2 or lower bugs
>> ================
> ...
>> Not completely supporting core OpenSolaris features (SMF, ...)

If I naively "wget, configure, make, make install, pkg push"
some FOSS project off of sourceforge that uses init.d instead
of SMF, or grab a GNU utility that does not know about posix
ACLs, that project isn't well integrated into opensolaris.
This "poor integration" is a bug because it "hides" the very
things that many feel make OpenSolaris better than Linux...

I think that this actually points out the only significant
difference between Solaris and OpenSolaris:

    If one tried to include the above "poorly integrated"
    package into Solaris, the usual ARC answer would have
    been "No!" or "You have to fix those 'poor integration'
    bugs before you integrate".

    Now, with OpenSolaris and experimental-tagged repos,
    the answer is "OK, but you may need a mitigation plan
    for better integrating it if you ever wish to move out
    of the experimental ghetto and into a more mainstream
    one".

   -John