FOSS and Interface Taxonomy levels

[Danek Duvall]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 02:07:44PM -0600, Nicolas Williams wrote:

> A Solaris + a la carte FOSS system could easily result in DLL hell too,
> no?

Absolutely.  My proposal, though, is to make them easily separable.
(Open)Solaris contains the bits where we've put quite a bit of thought into
the architectural issues, we're confident that the stability levels we've
attached to the components are accurate, they're sufficiently stable to
build on them, and there are customers (including ourselves) who need them
and need that stability.

And then there's the rest.  The community can still benefit from having
"the rest" go through an architectural review -- like I said, for system
integration points primarily, but also to have sets of eyes on the problem
which are more used to investigating systems architecture issues.  But no
one is necessarily making any promises about these components, other than
a) they'll be available as long as the community producing them is making
them available and b) upgrades will be made available with some regularity.

I believe that members of the OpenSolaris community should expend the
effort necessary to properly classify the interfaces they introduce, and to
manage their lifecycles according to those classifications.  I think that
this is one of the primary benefits that we can provide to our developers
and end-users.  And we should always strive to introduce interfaces at as
stable a commitment level as is appropriate, given how they're managed at
the source (if we're not developing them ourselves).

But I still think there's a place for interfaces which change rapidly and
incompatibly.  I myself would generally choose not to introduce such
things, but if others want to do so, and yet others want to use them
despite the risk, I don't really want to stand in their way.  DLL hell?
Sure.  But with mandates for Sun projects not to use such things, with
strong encouragement from distro maintainers not to use such things, and
with warnings for developers not to use them, I think we can be honest
about this part of the world without having to gate it off completely, even
if navigating through it in any fashion we'd consider rational is
impossible.

Danek