[indiana-discuss] Package names and versioning for upcoming releases

[Qingye Jiang (John)]

Hi Shawn,

Let me be very straight forward...

First, I work for Sun, so I hope to death that this new IPS thing can be 
a tremendous success.

Second, I was very disappointed to hear you saying that because there 
are Sun guildlines so you are doing the same thing with IPS.

IPS is an opensource project -- that means it belongs to the community 
rather than Sun, although currently the majority of contributions come 
from Sun. And, as a community project it should follow the rules of the 
community rather than Sun -- although Sun's guildlines might become the 
guildlines of this community after being considered and discussed by the 
community.

At this point I, along with several others, suggested that the package 
names might need some further consideration. And you are saying that 
because this is already defined in the Sun guildlines, we need to do it 
in this way. When you say this you might think that you are working on a 
Sun internal project rather than an open source project. Also you give 
people the impression that this is a Sun internal project rather than an 
open source project -- simply because the decision are make among the 
very few of you who are sitting somewhere in Menlo Park rather than 
among the community.

And, when people observe that Sun engineers take OpenSolaris as a Sun 
internal project, they hesitate to join / contribute to the OpenSolaris 
community, some of them who were part of our community choose to leave 
the later.

I believe that IPS is a great idea, and it is growing in great shape. 
But the success of the OpenSolaris project will depend on both how 
people think about the project and how people think about the technology.

Are we really open enough? Do we think about those people from outside 
of Sun (although they are currently minorities) and take their ideas 
into consideration when we contribute to an open source project?

What do you think?

John


Shawn Walker 写道:
> On 22/11/2007, Qingye Jiang (John) <John.Jiang at sun.com> wrote:
>   
>> When we are moving to opensource, I think we are really moving to where
>> the (potential) users are, and deliver what the users would expect to
>> see and use. When I typed the command "pkg status -a" and there came a
>> long list of stuff that I did not understand unless I want to dig deep
>> into the definition of FMRI for packages. A large number of potential
>> users might just give up at that point.
>>     
>
> There is no usability study to back these claims at this point.
>
> I also do not understand how "SUNW" in front of a package name would
> keep you from "understanding" the output pkg status -a.
>
>   
>> Again, can we think about the word 'user friendly', rather than the Sun
>> guildlines that were written in the grandma age? Isn't it because we
>> lost market share miserably in the past that we want to make something
>> different?
>>     
>
> Your definition of user friendly and mine do not necessarily match.
> For example, what is user friendly to existing Sun customers, and what
> is user friendly to those that have never been a Sun customer? Meeting
> the needs of both is a necessity.
>
> As far as "guidelines...written in the grandma age"; remember that
> many of these guidelines were established by fellow peers. They were
> not invented without thought, debate, and careful deliberation. Sun
> has been commercially producing software and providing
> industry-recognised support for years. To dismiss their experience
> out-of-hand simply because it does not seem "modern" would be a great
> loss.
>
>