FOSS and Interface Taxonomy levels

[James Carlson]

John Plocher writes:
> > Right now, we have no effective way to deliver components for Solaris other
> > than through "the foundation of our systems".  Solaris is delivered as a
> > giant, monolithic blob, appropriately highlighted by its moniker, the WOS.
> > 
> > If we had a better delivery system, 
> 
> I'm not saying "don't ARC...", but instead "if it isn't a required
> part of the core, don't put it in the core, especially if it is chaotic".

We're intentionally adding a pile 'o stuff, whether it's required or
not -- libsane may be needed, but things like "mtr" clearly aren't.
We seem to have no idea if the upstream is truly chaotic or not, so we
paste "Volatile" all over everything and just call it a day.

That's pretty much the same thing as not bothering to do architecture.
We're just doing that by proxy -- misuse of the taxonomy is a proxy
for our lack of clear design.

> It used to be that SFW was the place to put non-core things, but then
> we started depending on stuff delivered there.  (Wouldn't it be nice
> if we stopped playing games and focused on building a distributed
> packaging system?  Oh, wait, we're doing both :-)

SFW was always the place to put things that you depended on.  I think
you're thinking of the old CCD, which was quite different.

> > As long as we understand -- and document for the end-users so they
> > understand -- that these bits may change chaotically, we shouldn't disallow
> > Volatile software from shipping.
> 
> The more we intermix this stuff into the core ON, Desktop, Admin and
> Install consolidations, the harder it will be to avoid the taxonomy/
> release/behavior disconnects, and the harder it becomes to untangle
> things once we have a better delivery mechanism...

I'm probably alone in seriously doubting that better delivery
mechanisms will help much.

The problem isn't the packaging, or in the way in which versions are
expressed, but rather it's in the inherent dependencies in the
software itself.  If the bits really are chaotic, then you end up in a
situation where you have unresolvable conflicts: you're both required
to upgrade some package to get a needed feature and prohibited from
doing so by the constraints of the other packages you've installed.

The obvious situation is with Foo needing libbar-2.0 and Blah needing
only libbar-1.0, and the two libbars being incompatible.  You need to
pick one.  Good luck.

I've been there with 'apt' on Debian.  It hurts plenty, and incredible
detail and asynchrony in package versioning and delivery doesn't help.
It just means you'll be in much deeper when you finally do run into
trouble.  At the time, my "fix" for the problem was to reformat the
drive and switch to Solaris.  It'd be a shame to lose that as an
option.

If we have people building atop OpenSolaris, we owe them at least a
stable foundation on which to build.  Anything less is really not
worth the effort, in my estimation.

So, what benefit for Volatile libraries?

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677