[indiana-discuss] [osol-discuss] [advocacy-discuss] Project Indiana and the OpenSolaris name

[Jon Trulson]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> Jon Trulson <jon at radscan.com> wrote:
>
>>> It is obvious that if Sun calls a distro "OpenSolaris", many people believe
>>> that this is the one and only.
>>>
>>
>>    FWIW, as a third party that develops software on Solaris, I would
>>    welcome an 'OpenSolaris Reference' distribution.
>
> This would cause problems too.
>
> It is better to define a binary compatibility guideline and to have a test
> for compatibility. We, the community of people who create distributions
> in addition need to take care that this test is complete enough.
>
> To understand this problem: If I did not push Sun to verify /usr/bin/tar
> against _my_ POSIX compliance test, Sun tar would still not create/read
> POSIX.1-1988 compliant archives although it did pass the OpenGroup tests.
>
>
> Note that if a distribution _adds_ this to the compatibility definitions,
> this would make this distro unsuitable as a reference. For the same reason,
> I need to correct you as I believe that believe that "Sun OpenSolaris" could
> be a reference distribution. "Sun OpenSolaris" would most likely include
> more software than the reference requires and thus make it unsuitable as a
> reference.
>

   As Casper replied previously, defining 'compatibility' is
   non-trivial.  No doubt what I consider 'compatible' might have no
   meaning to a company like adobe, who would have other requirements.

   What I was trying to get across was that one of Solaris's strengths
   is that it is actually designed, implemented, documented, and then
   supported for 'a while', something which is generally alien to Linux.

   As an example, if an OpenSolaris Reference Implementation (OSRI)
   supports package manager 'Coolio', then I would expect other dists
   based on OSRI to also support 'Coolio', even if it also contains
   some other package manager.

   I would like kernel modules and userland binaries compiled on OSRI
   to run, unmodified, on any dist that calls itself based on OSRI.  I
   know this sounds a little silly (and maybe pretty obvious), but for
   any of you that have had to develop and support software on Linux,
   and in particular, the Linux kernel - you know how important this
   stuff is.

> A reference distro has no less _and_ no more than the interface definition
> and grants users that software compiled on that distro to run on any
> other compatible distro.
>

   Well, an OSRI has to be actually *usable* as well...

> Jörg
>
>

-- 
Happy cheese in fear                 | Jon Trulson
against oppressor, rebel!            | mailto:jon at radscan.com 
Brocolli, hostage.       -Unknown    | #include <std/disclaimer.h>