Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Sun's PR team talked me into driving to downtown San Francisco twice this week to meet with various press and analysts at Linux World. Note to PR team, the informal cocktail hours are often more productive that formal 1:1 interviews. To no surprise, one of my favorite editors, Ashlee Vance cornered me halfway through a glass of red wine searching for the real story behind our rumored 2048 thread CPU. Give me a break, I told him, I'm in Solaris now, go ask Fowler's guys. To which Ashlee came back with, "so what's a Solaris guy doing at Linux world?". He knew the answer, of course, which is that I'm hanging out with a bunch of Linux folks to figure out what they want in Project Indiana. Ashlee's next question was why hadn't I blogged in the last week. Mainly because I've spent all my free time driving back and forth from Menlo Park to San Francisco, I told him.

So on to the great shell debate. I continue to be surprised by how passionate people are about simple things like the default shell. This isn't a new debate, but was certainly rekindled this week. If you want to get a small flavor of what I'm talking about, try this Google search. A couple of comments on the thread. First of all, I'm totally honored that at least some of the OpenSolaris community members think Ian or myself should make the choice. We have both been working in the Solaris group for about 4 months and there are certainly people in the Solaris community who know a lot more about shells than either of us. Reading through the thread one begins to understand why it sometimes is so difficult for open source communities to come to agreement.

Luckily, we are making a lot of engineering progress towards the first OpenSolaris/Indiana binary release. Build 70 of Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE), due out next week, should have the final bits of the new installer. Yes, I will be quick to point out that SXCE is not Indiana, but it is all the same basic OpenSolaris source base, for the most part. We are still targeting this fall for the big change when we roll out the new packaging system which will form the basis for the OpenSolaris/Indiana "distro" model. So Build 70 will still have the new installer loading a massive multi-GB Solaris wad of stuff, but at least you will get a better flavor of what installing OpenSolaris/Indiana will be like.

As to when we change the default shell, all the extra email makes me feel special, so we will just hold off on that decision for a while. But for those of you looking for a bit of real news, I will leak out that we are finalizing dates for the first OpenSolaris developer summit, which we plan to hold in the SF Bay area in early October. Hopefully next week we can announce the exact dates. The OpenSolaris developer summit will bring together about 100 of the core OpenSolaris developers, lock them in a room for two days, and open the doors when they agree on the target features for OpenSolaris for the next six months, and yes, that will have to include the default shell. So stay tuned. Meanwhile, if you just want to developer on OpenSolaris, check out our Sun Tech Days calendar. Several dozen tech day programs (they are 2-3 days each) are scheduled for various places around the world for the coming months. I just reviewed the new Tech Days agenda yesterday, and it looks great.