On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 at 00:22, Carl Brewer via openindiana-discuss <[email protected]> wrote: > What actually belongs in an operating system? > > I see, or at least I think I see, a lot of effort on various platforms, > to maintain applications (gimp? really? bundled?!), and when humans are > scarce, is this at the expense of device drivers, installation systems > and so on? > > For a little while, I recall one of the *BSD ports systems
Ultimately ports is just a separate consolidation of software with its own build system. This isn't really better than OmniOS or OpenIndiana are doing with installable binary packages of software, it's just different. There's even a similar split between core pieces, which mostly come from illumos-gate and are generally common between distributions, and other software like web servers or VirtualBox, which tend to come from other consolidations. > good pathway to take, but now we seem to have this weird IPS thingo and > all the barriers to entry that it introduces. It's not really clear what barriers you're talking about. Building IPS packages and running repository servers is not actually that complicated, and there are several mature existing frameworks for doing it en masse; e.g., oi-userland and omnios-build and omnios-extra. It's true that performance could be better and memory usage could be lower, but those are questions of degree, not kind. It is otherwise a robust, modern packaging system that integrates well with ZFS-based boot environments for atomic updates. It has first class support for managing various core illumos facilities like the driver binding database and SMF services. It continues to be maintained and improved by folks in our community. > "we" spend a lot of time farting around with applications that really, > aren't up to a niche community to support. I use VirtualBox on my O/I > servers, but should it be bundled, or something that we get with source > and compile ourselves? Asking users to compile their own software doesn't make a lot of sense. It feels like the core question you're asking is about if we should be maintaining a bunch of packages with the scarce resources of a volunteer community like the one surrounding OpenIndiana -- but surely if everybody has to spend more time compiling and patching and maintaining their own software from scratch, the community will have even less time and energy to do anything else? If somebody is willing to compile some software that's personally important to them, it's really not more work for them to just write the build recipe and publish the package. The community benefits, obviously, but _that person_ also benefits the moment they have to install that software on a second computer, because the work is, in every sense, already done. It's also easy to see everybody agrees that having more drivers would be good! The thing is, the only way we will get drivers is if you pick a piece of hardware you'd like to use, and _write a driver_. If you have hardware for which a driver is not currently available, the best thing to do is to start working on that driver right now. The kernel is not magic; it's just a big C program. Anybody who can compile random bits of software on a UNIX system can surely learn how to do it, especially with help from other resources in the community. The most important question to ask is: if not you, then who? Cheers. -- Joshua M. Clulow http://blog.sysmgr.org _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
