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

[Joerg Schilling]

John Plocher <John.Plocher at Sun.COM> wrote:

> [Followups to trademark-policy-dev at opensolaris.org]
>
> Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > Compatiblitiy is less trivial than you might belive but without conformance 
> > tests, we cannot claim anything about compatibility
>
>  > ...
>
> > 
> > A distro alone cannot be a refernce. It must not even be changed for 
> > the compatibility tests.
>
> One of my comments on the wiki definition was along the lines of:
>
>      We could, as a starting place for defining compatibility,
>      simply assert that there is a baseline (installer and
>      a set of versioned packages; a "recipe", if you will)
>      that must exist in any distro if it wants to claim
>      compatibility.

If there are several levels, e.g.:

-	Plain ON

-	ON + X

-	ON + GNUME

it would allow to create application classes and to predict whether an 
application should run.

If somebody e.g. includes add-ons in his libc, this does not help.
This explains how hard it is to create a compliance test. Unless you know
what odd interface you need to look for, you may only realize that a program
compiled on 'A OpenSolaris' will not run on 'B OpenSolaris'.

Jörg

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