[indiana-discuss] Ok here come my 2c

[stephen o'grady]

> I disagree with the notion for a "Opensolaris" packaging system. Let
> every derived distro do its own packaging. We are the core, we are
> neutral, we don't tell you what GUI to use, if you wan't WIN32 on top
> of the core, go ahead and do it.
> 
> This would be what I would call a core reference, which would also
> make the binaries between real distros or however you want to call them
> compatble, without the need of them being pure wishi washy if they
> want to contain compatibility.

if by compatibility you mean package format compatibility, then +1. 

while i agree to extent that you don't need a standardized packaging _system_ - though it seems silly to reinvent the wheel - having a common, agreed upon packaging _format_ is critical, as far as i'm concerned. 

one of the unfortunate consequences of the divergent innovation in the Linux model is that each distribution requires maintainers for the same packages. i.e. Debian has a MySQL package maintainer, Fedora has a MySQL package maintainer, Gentoo has a MySQL package maintainer, and so on. 

this is somewhat necessary given the parallel evolutionary tracks that Linux distributions have proceeded along, but it is redundant. 

as i've said before [1], and virtually everyone on list seems to agree, package management is fundamentally a must have going forward. decisions around packaging format, however, will go a long way towards determining a.) how much effort the Solaris family of distributions will have to invest in redundant effort and b.) how trivial or non-trivial it is for PMC's from the Linux world to bring their skillset over to the Solaris one if they should choose to. 

[1] http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/05/16/to-sun-good-job-on-on-the-jre-license-but-ive-got-another-job-for-you/