[indiana-discuss] Name of Distro?

[Andy Cater]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 09:25:23PM -0400, Ian Murdock wrote:
> 
> You don't get it.
> 
> It doesn't matter if the common touchstone is just a kernel
> or the kernel and the entire userspace. The source
> code doesn't make a platform. The binaries make a platform.
> 

This man knows what he's talking about. Linux Journal no. 1
- 1994 - has an article on precisely _why_ a young Ian Murdock 
set out the Debian distribution with the principles he did.

Love it or loathe it - and I suspect at times, Ian has done both :) -
Debian is _the_ most successful completely open community of 
programmers that there is. That statement in and of itself is its own 
double edged sword :)

> That's why we need OpenSolaris to be a binary distribution.
> 

Hear, hear. I'd like a full Solaris system to be installed in under 
20 minutes from binaries (and a pony, and a flying car and a Captain 
Crunch whistle and a secret decoder ring ... but I'd give up all these 
last for a Solaris that I could work with quickly and easily)

[RANT - feel free to ignore :) ]

If it were down to me, I'd re-integrate Nexenta with Debian and give
the OpenSolaris reference platform to Debian to deal with. Not 
commercial: lots of experience on different architectures - now the 
_only_ major Linux to install on Sparc, for example - and with 32 and 64 
bitness issues, and the upstream for Canonical's Ubuntu :)

> Trust me. I've lived this mess for the last 10 years, and
> it's been my job for the past 2 to try to clean it up,
> which turns out to be very difficult to do after the fact..
> 

This man knows standards and the need to get commonality. His Progeny 
work and his LSB work showed that.

For myself - I'm a Linux sysadmin who's been exposed to Solaris - 
usually admin'ed by other people, two or three releases behind and not 
well patched :(

I've had the joy of Solaris 7 on Intel :( and the pleasure that was
Debian of the same vintage on Sparc.

I've had the joy of persuading standard GNU packages - gcc 
and Emacs - onto Solaris 8.

I'd like the Sun Solaris kernel, ZFS and DTrace in my OpenSolaris, 
please: everything else is a bonus but I don't need cruft, 

I don't necessarily need two toolchains - though the option to switch 
and drop in a "traditional Sun" / GNU toolchain and compilation/library 
stack at a moment's notice would be very useful.

I'd like an 18 month release cycle - so that there's time for 
some development and then a period of testing, testing, testing and 
eventual rock-solid stability.

I now return you to the scheduled discussion on the colour of the bike 
shed :) [1]

Andy 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed#References



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