[indiana-discuss] current state of affairs..

[Shawn Walker]

Sriram Natarajan wrote:
> Hi
> Thought, I would share some of the pains I had to go through today to 
> simply get a new version of subversion my system for some of my 
> development work.  Unfortunately, OpenSolaris 2009.06 (build 111) - my 
> primary workstation - has a very old version of subversion. Now, when I 
> tried to compile it by myself, I ran into weird compilation errors like
...
> Now, this resulted in another error..
> 
> PHASE                                        ACTIONS
> Install Phase                              3016/4246 Action install 
> failed for 'opt/csw/lib/i386' (pkg://blastwave/IPScommon):
>  ActionExecutionError: attempted to remove link 'opt/csw/lib/i386' but 
> found a directory

Yes, the blastwave packages are broken; hence the error.

> My main point of this email is - inspite of having great kernel and cool 
> features within OpenSolaris, if we don't ship the latest and stable open 
> source tools, engineers can't use OSOL as their primary dev workstation..

Building a tested and support operating system, by necessity, means 
freezing the versions of software contained within it.  It is not 
practical to expect the latest versions of open source software, 
especially with projects that move very quickly, to always be available.

I would also note that:

* the necessary resources are not currently available to update software 
as frequently as you suggest

* that many open source projects are difficult to compile on 
OpenSolaris, not because of OpenSolaris, but because of their 
non-portable code and/or broken build systems

Cheers,
-- 
Shawn Walker