[indiana-discuss] what's next?

[Ian Murdock]

First of all: Welcome!

Now what?

In my view, the work we have to do falls into five buckets:

1. What's the starting point, and what process/infrastructure
do we need to manage its evolution? Are we starting with Solaris Nevada
builds and (presumably) moving the binary/package/CD build process,
C-teams, etc. into the community over time? Or are we building new
process etc.? I'm unfamiliar enough with how things work today
that I'm a bit apprehensive about this, but at the same time,
I've done this enough times in Linux to know it's doable in a
fairly short timeframe even if we have to start from scratch.
Need to have a serious discussion of the various options here.

2. What is in "the core OS"? Clearly, if we're shrinking something
that ships on 6 CDs/1 DVD to 1 CD, we're going to need to
cut things. Also, are we providing roughly what someone
familiar with Linux would expect? Where are the gaps etc.?

3. Package system. This isn't just pkg-get or apt-get on top of #2,
but just as importantly, the framework and tools for community members
to contribute packages. This is where I expect to have the bulk of
community involvement. Someone finds their favorite tool isn't packaged,
so they package it. That's certainly how Debian/Ubuntu have worked.

4. How to deliver on "laptop support"? This is the tricky bit if
you ask me. It's taken Linux years to get to the point where
it's mostly usable on laptops. Where are the major pain points? Power
management and wireless networking seem like obvious ones. How do we
make a quantum leap here? Can we leverage virtualization? Can we "port"
Linux or Windows drivers to Solaris via a shim layer?  We obviously
can't do everything in the first pass, but we can identify
the two or three highest bang for the buck areas to focus on for v1.

5. "Raising the bar", i.e., why come over to Solaris once the adoption
barriers are gone? Some ideas: ZFS root by default is an obvious win, as
is using ZFS to snapshot before updates to implement rollback. How about
an AMP stack with integrated DTrace probes? Or "Solaris as hypervisor",
i.e., making installation on the bare metal involve just laying down the
core bits needed to spin up Containers and Xen domains, and stage two
involves provisioning new VMs, something that Linux does poorly.
Again, not much we can do all at once, but we should set aside 2 or
3 of the highest bang for the buck items and work on
them. We've certainly got plenty of raw material to work with here.

I'll be posting further thoughts in each of these general directions
over the next few days. I'm particularly interested in #1 now, and on
getting something we can call "Indiana 0.0" available as soon
as possible such that the rest becomes much more an iterative process.

-ian
-- 
Ian Murdock
650-331-9324
http://ianmurdock.com/

"Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige