Friday October 26, 2007
Jyri Virkki
Friday October 26, 2007
Can SFW be relevant in Indiana?
Or should it?
As you probably know, SFW is a consolidation which delivers externally maintained open source components into the OpenSolaris world so you don't have to download, configure and build them yourself every time.
Looking at the current sources under cmd and lib I see on the order of about 80 components (I'm only looking for an order of magnitude estimate here so that's close enough).
Hopping over to my debian server, I see:
% aptitude search . | wc -l 20560
Now, that's not even remotely a fair comparison as that counted every available package, not just the kind of components OpenSolaris would classify under SFW. But even if, say, only half of them are "SFW-ish", that is still two orders of magnitude more than what is available in SFW today.
Any which way you slice the approximations, SFW has a lot of catching up to do! How do we get there?
Given my recent experiences bringing Web Stack components (PHP; Squid, Apache, Ruby and MySQL still pending) into SFW it has become clear that the SFW process is unsuitable for digesting open source packages at the rate which they must become available for Solaris. Given the current rate of progress, it looks like we're delivering about 2.5 components per quarter or 10 a year. Of course that's just from my small team, but even with a lot more people that's just not going to do it.
If you're following the Indiana packaging progress, there's much to be excited about. From Stephen's talk at the OpenSolaris Developer Summit it seems that multiple repositories will integrate quite seamlessly.
Putting one and one together... it is clear to me that SFW will need to adapt to this new world or it will quickly be replaced by another repository free of the overhead of SFW.
One of the cool things about OpenSolaris is how it will force such inefficiencies out of the system one way or the other! Whichever way things go, it is an exciting time to be participating in OpenSolaris.
Posted at 09:14AM Oct 26, 2007 by jyri in WebStack | Comments[1]
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I want both! The quick and broad availability of software I expect from Linux, and the stability of interfaces I expect from Solaris. I don't like scripts breaking because someone gratuitously changed a command line option. You can do a lot by aliasing commands and choosing whether /usr/sfw/bin comes before or after /bin in your PATH. It might be nice to have a toolbar icon to select the desired behavior. And of course scripts ought to explicitly set the PATH they need to obtain stable interfaces.
Posted by Walter Bays on October 26, 2007 at 10:47 AM PDT #