[gnu-sol-discuss] Re: [companion-discuss] Re: [sfwnv-discuss] Open Source software and OpenSolaris. What is the deal?

[Steve Christensen]

I agree with Mike on his comments and ...

A good portion of the "upstream maintainers" I have dealt with over the 
years either have no Solaris boxes or have either a SPARC or x86
box, but rarely both, and often NOT running anything like the most 
recent version of Solaris/Opensolaris.  If you really want to avoid 
"latency", you will get more of it that you ever imagined unless you are 
willing to ship a lot of free machines, make sure that developers update 
them with the latest Opensolaris releases, and actually do the work of 
getting the packages to the world.  Projects like mine and Dennis's and 
whatever potentially replaces the SFW/CCD for Opensolaris are still the 
best bet.

That is not to say the software developers don't want Solaris packages, 
they usually do, but they want someone else to do that.  "Evangelists" 
will be needed in a big way to get developers to assist in porting their 
code and promoting its use on Solaris.

This work will likely have to be done by you, the people who are reading 
these discussion lists right now - how much are you willing to contribute?

As for the CCD latency, since I am now doing the builds/packaging, here 
is the plan.  I am currently working to remove the source packages 
builds from the CCD code.  Barring any problems, this will be done very 
soon.  Then, I (and anyone else who wants to help) will finish updating 
all of the software to the most recent released versions.  New releases 
of the CCD package build using the most recent version of Nevada will be 
put on the Opensolaris servers every two weeks (packages for NV 62 were 
put up a few day ago).   New versions of the software contained on the 
CCD will be added so long as they build.  As programs get moved to ON or 
SFW or elsewhere off of the CCD, they will be removed from the CCD as 
appropriate.  All of this is overseen by code reviewers from 
companion-discuss and then by submitting RTI's in the usual way.

It is likely that at some point, the community and Sun will define some 
sort of replacement for the CCD, whether via Laca's project or something 
else.  No one should underestimate the amount of resources any such a 
project will take if it is to be successful - whether from paid 
engineers or volunteers.

None of this should affect the projects that supply software for the 
very large group of Solaris 10 or below users where there is now, and 
will continue to be, a big demand.  I still have important users 
downloading Solaris 2.5 packages!   But, mechanisms for automating 
package builds for Opensolaris that can be made to operate on older 
releases of Solaris could be very useful.

Steve C.

Mike Kupfer wrote:
> I've added companion-discuss to the discussion.  And I've added Laca
> from the JDS group, since he's working on a project[1] that should make it
> easier to keep third-party apps current.  For those folks: this thread
> was started by Brian Gupta's observation[2] that there are several
> overlapping projects that deal with third-party open source code and
> (Open)Solaris and maybe things could be done more efficiently.
> 
>>>>>> "jek3" == Joseph Kowalski <jek3 at sun.com> writes:
> 
> jek3> I think the concept of CCD is simply bad.  We should not be
> jek3> providing a recompilation and packaging service. We should be
> jek3> providing assistance to the ultimate code maintainers to provide
> jek3> Solaris "packages" just like they provide RPMs (or whatever) for
> jek3> Linux. Let's turn our "recompile" junkies into "Solaris Packaging
> jek3> Evangelists" (easier said than done - different skill set - but
> jek3> hopefully you get the idea).
> 
> The upstream maintainers will need Solaris boxes (SPARC and x86) in
> order to produce Solaris packages.  I'm skeptical that they will be
> enthusiastic about this.
> 
> jek3> Second, there is an unavoidable latency introduced by placing a
> jek3> "CCD" service in the loop.  
> 
> Up through Solaris 10 the Companion had a horrible latency problem,
> because we only shipped new bits with each Solaris update release.
> 
> Now it has a smaller latency, which is the time to download the latest
> upstream source, tweak local patches as needed, rebuild and sanity-test,
> then push new packages to opensolaris.org.
> 
> jek3> The Linux distros don't have this latency.
> 
> They didn't have the first one that I mentioned, but I believe they do
> have the second one.
> 
> mike
> 
> [1] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/companion-discuss/2007-April/000522.html
> 
> [2] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/sfwnv-discuss/2007-May/000380.html
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