

OpenSolaris fork imminent? - dman
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=132606&tstart=0

======
Corrado
Perhaps this is a inane question, but why should we care about Solaris? What
does it bring to the table over BSD or Linux? If it died tomorrow would your
shop close up and everyone go home?

I know some of its features (DTrace and ZFS) are quite impressive but they are
not really deal breakers. A kernel is great but it doesn't do much on its own.
You still need applications and drivers to have a complete system.

~~~
rbanffy
> why should we care about Solaris?

It's the only OS that can boot from a ZFS volume and that also has a sane
package management system.

~~~
iambvk
Are you suggesting packaging in debian or fedora has some issues? Can you
elaborate in one or two lines? Thanks.

~~~
rbanffy
No. Debian and Fedora have just fine package managers. What they can't do is
boot from a ZFS file system. I am implying Solaris and FreeBSD (the other OSs
that boot from ZFS, AFAIK) don't have a sane packaging system.

~~~
wwortiz
I am curious what you find wrong with FreeBSD's package management, or is it
in reference to packages and does not include ports?

~~~
rbanffy
Source-based packaging is slower than binary packages. The binary package
system, although it exists, is not as simple to use.

In Red Hat-ish distros, I can do "yum update". In Debian-ish distros, I can
run "aptitude safe-upgrade". On Debian, I can even do a dist-upgrade and
update the box to a new release without having to reinstall it (or boot into
the installer). Everything is downloaded, installed and, if needed, restarted.
Very close to zero downtime.

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wrighty
I guess it's a case of waiting for the announcement before passing comment -
but if this is a new OpenSolaris distribution what does it matter when
Oracle/Sun still employ 99% of all active developers?

~~~
rbanffy
Will 99% of osol developers stay with Oracle for long?

Sun looked like the ultimate geek-cool environment to work. Oracle is pretty
much the ultimate uncool company to work for as a developer.

~~~
wmf
People who quit Oracle are going to work for other proprietary software
companies where they'll be working on something other than Solaris. I don't
see any business model to pay people to work on an OpenSolaris fork.

~~~
dman
Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris.
If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I
think funding will not be a problem.

~~~
nailer
Since about 2005 most large banks have started deploying on Linux for most new
projects. The place I'm at now, which is one of the most conservative
environments - NIS, heaps of Sol 8 under Vintage support, 15 year old home
grown perl scripts for config management, etc - has a minimal amount of Linux
skills amongst the day to day support staff, just declared Solaris a non-
strategic platform.

~~~
rbanffy
The question is how many banks do you need to subsidize the evolution of
OpenSolaris/Illumos? Considering what a Sun/Oracle support contract costs, not
many.

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barnaby
Will the fork still be licensed under CDDL or is there a way to switch it to
GPL?

------
superjared
hg clone <http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/>

~~~
wrighty
Looks like they're replacing the proprietary Sun libc with one from Nexenta /
FreeBSD.

<http://hg.illumos.org/illumos/rev/c8da1d642945>

------
zemanel
i like OS but the desktop UX is where linux was years ago

~~~
barrkel
I'd distinguish between OpenSolaris the distribution and Solaris the kernel;
and my interest in this lies in the server side of things, not UI. I'm
currently using Nexenta, which uses the Solaris kernel with a server-oriented
Debian userland. The things Solaris brings along, ZFS, dtrace, SMF etc. are
not hugely relevant to the desktop.

~~~
rbanffy
> The things Solaris brings along, ZFS (...) are not hugely relevant to the
> desktop

Have you ever accidentally deleted your MP3 collection? ;-)

~~~
barrkel
Indeed I have not, in fact I usually disable file deletion confirmation
prompts and also delayed deletion mechanisms like Windows' Recycle Bin. ZFS
snapshots are more useful to me as a kind of system-wide version control; I
don't use them often.

The few times I have deleted things accidentally - perhaps 3 times in the past
5 years - I've recovered in a few moments from backups. I've lost more data to
hard drive failures with somewhat stale backups than accidental deletion. The
redundancy of ZFS raidz / raidz2 / mirroring etc. is useful to reduce the risk
disk failure, but of course offsite backup is the gold standard.

------
c00p3r
Why not FreeBSD? Just to run Oracle? But it is much easier to run it on Linux
nowadays.

btw, who will write and debug all the new device drivers?

~~~
nailer
I've modded you back up as I have the same question, albeit I think some
explanation would help: FreeBSD has the good bits of the Solaris kernel - ZFS
and DTrace - and the common Solaris 10 userspace - toolchain, packaging, etc.
- aren't particularly up to date.

~~~
c00p3r
Add to this an idiotic attempt to replace SystemV startup scripts with some
insanely non-obvious java-based (of course!) crap, badly ported in a great
hurry outdated 32-bit userland (when at the same time x86_64 version of Fedora
or FreeBSD-ports were several years old), some in-house designed and quite
alien packaging system (pkg) and so on.

It is dead. As dead as Irix or Tru64 or even OpenVMS.

~~~
ssmoot
Solaris SMF is actually one of the best things about Solaris (IMO). Runit
documentation as an init replacement are woefully out of date for most
platforms, and Upstart seems like it's still beta at-best.

I'm not that savvy, but I know of nothing for Linux or FreeBSD that starts
everything up, makes sure it gets restarted if it crashes, notifies you, has
maintenance states, supports simple, robust dependencies (process or file-
based). The SMF covers these bases very well.

Runit seems to come closest on the service side, but it's not nearly as well
documented. Monit is almost a suitable substitute (even though that's not
really it's goal), but robust dependency support is lacking last I checked.

~~~
nailer
> Solaris SMF is actually one of the best things about Solaris (IMO)?

XML config files? Java when a regular Unix system language like C or Python
(or Perl for older folks) would suffice?

~~~
ssmoot
XML isn't the best perhaps. But it's not a road-block either. New config files
are always new.

And who cares what it's implemented in as long as it doesn't fall over? I
mean, _ideally_ sure. C FTW on resource utilization, but honestly, if the
choice is between something that's a bit of a pig, eating up 100MB of RAM vs
what...? Really simply put: There is no competition that checks the same boxes
that I'm aware of.

I'd be genuinely grateful if you can show me an alternative, especially for
GNU/Linux and FreeBSD, but most of the alternatives are new early-phase
projects with grand goals that may never materialize, or unmaintained.

So sure, SMF isn't perfect. What's better?

