scope (was Re: [indiana-discuss] ZFS to the max)

[Shawn Walker]

On 02/07/07, Daniel Griffith <mechadaniel at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 6/26/07, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz at gnome.org> wrote:
>
> > If we are seriously thinking about making solaris more appealing to linux
> > (and any) users, we should seriosly rethink the way we name packages. For
> > me, any of those package names means absolutely nothing (I know SUNW because
> > I like stock market issues, but I think this SUNW thing is also redundant
> > and meaningless for most people).
>
> +1
>
> On 6/27/07, Alvaro Lopez Ortega <alvaro at sun.com> wrote:
>
> >    It's true that the SUNW isn't really meaningful, and that usually
> >    package names are quite cryptic.
> >
> >    However, it is very important to remain compatible with all the
> >    Solaris software out there. And of course, ISVs wouldn't be happy if
> >    we change all the package names over night.
> >
> >    Besides, with a decent installation utility, you wouldn't even need
> >    to know the name of the package. It can use the standard names
> >    internally, but that doesn't mean that you'd have to deal with them.
>
> I don't think that is much of a solution, and the current packages ARE
> one of the things that need to be swept away for Indiana to be
> acceptable to Linux users like me - that's a hack and not something
> that should be used in a new distribution.

You need a convincing argument for sweeping them away. There is
nothing stopping the packages from having full descriptions or
alternate names.

> Seperating package names and package file names is a ghastly solution
> to the problem, if I want to manually download a package called
> nvidia-drivers, I should be downloading a file called
> nvidia-drivers.***, not NVDAgraphics.***.

Why does that matter?

> I'm getting worried as I was hoping that from the first posts on this
> list that Indiana could take advantage of the mistakes and lessons
> learnt from Linux in the past 10 years, but it looks like it is going
> to be seriously hamstrung by compatibility to Solaris.

How was it  a mistake? Hamstrung how? In what way?

> What I'd love is GNU userland on the Solaris kernel, though I can

Then let me introduce you to Nexenta:

http://www.gnusolaris.org/

> I've just spent 3 weeks using Solaris Express for the first time (and
> hated every minute of it) and if opensolaris is just that with a
> package manager and ZFS boot I really doubt I'll be using it (it would
> be easier to use ZFS with FreeBSD) - some effort needs to go into
> looking into _why_ using Solaris is such a turn off to people used to
> modern Linux distributions rather than arguing about what WM should be
> bundled or what the distribution should be called...

If you read over the past discussions or even the problem statements,
you would realise that the project's goals are more than just to
repackage software in a different manner.

-- 
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. " --Donald Knuth