Re: RFC: Better portability for package maintainers
On Sunday 21 May 2006 05:35, Erast Benson wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 21:11 +0200, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:
> > On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 11:51:09AM -0700, Erast Benson wrote:
> > > Do you really believe so? Do you understand that such a "hybrid" will
> > > not run any existing Solaris apps like you will not be able to run
> > > simple thinks like Macromedia flush player, JRE, JDK, Oracle, SAP, etc
> > > etc... Do you still wanna do that?
> >
> > Erm.
> >
> > If Oracle and SAP are on your list of “simple things”, what then are
> > large complex things for you?
>
> But I hope you still got me right. For me, all these "things" are
> existing applications which must run. The world is not 100% open sourced
> yet and we are in it, we are part of it, therefore my ideal OS need to
> be capable to run existing freeware and closed binaries as is without
> re-compilation. I want to run VMware, Oracle, Skype, SAP, Macromedia
> flush, etc, etc, etc. I want my Nexenta to run DTrace, BrandZ
> virtualization, ZFS, Zones without major re-design, etc, etc, etc...
>
> Once you accompany OpenSolaris kernel with GLIBC, you will kill this
> capability, you will not be able to run anything other than OSS compiled
> for your particular distro. That was my point. And isn't LSB is what
> GNU/Linux moving towards to? In OpenSolaris we have its Core which we
> following as a standard and I don't see any single reason not to do so.
You have your points right, but you should realize that Debian GNU / <Kernel>,
is glibc based. This means that your Base System without the kernel should
come from GNU sources. Having that said, you should invest some efforts to
port glibc to the Solaris (or OpenSolaris, Nevada, whatever[1]) kernel (to
support all these fancy features mentioned above), as this has been done for
glibc and the FreeBSD kernel by Bruno Haible.
On the other hand if you go for Solaris [1] own kernel and libc and porting
Free Software on the top of that, your Nexenta OS is as much GNU as say MS
Windows or Mac OS X since such (non-core or non-base) applications could be
ported and compiled on them too, but these OS'es does not have GNU in their
names (yet ;). Thus in this case Nexenta or GNUSolaris should be named like
Nexenta Sun / OpenSolaris ( as in Distributor Base / Kernel ;-)
P.S. no offence implied, just sharing some thoughts ;-)
[1] http://opensolaris.org/os/community/onnv/
Note that Opensolaris / Nevada are not GCC ready yet, Sun Studio 10 is the
preferred compiler
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