[illumos-Developer] Closed-bin accords of the OpenSolaris conference... / was: Re: illumos_145 i386 build status

[Roland Mainz]

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org> wrote:
>
>>On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 4:59 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
>>> Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
>>>>"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:
>>>>> I'm planning on importing FreeBSD sed, if there is a reason I should NOT do this, I would like to hear it.
>>>>
>>>>Since the test I was interested in did already pass FreeBSD-sed,
>>>>I know of no issue that could prevent this.
>>>
>>> Roland, Olga, any objections?
>>
>>Erm... I have a few objections:
>>1. I am very unhappy about Joerg pushing something where people like
>>Olga, me or the AT&T folks are currently busy with other things and
>>have explicitly announced this. Instead of giving us some time it
>>_feels_ like we're getting facts while the majority of other userland
>>developers can't object fully or provide an alternative.
>>
>>2. I am concerned about the ongoing splintering of the user interface.
>>Instead of having one more or less integrated user interface from one
>>upstream we're pulling a giant jigsaw from multiple sources together.
>>
>>3. We already worked on getting AST "sed" closer to GNU sed without
>>breaking POSIX/SUS conformance and getting it working as shell
>>builtin. Picking another implementation technically kills that work
>>
>>4. As a _reminder_ for Joeg (this is the part where I am  ANGRY with
>>Joerg for trying to break this): During the first OpenSolaris
>>conference John Plocher invitet a couple of people, including me, John
>>Sonnenschein and a few others (AFAIK Al Hopper was there, too) to
>>discuss the issue of the closed source and getting rid of it as part
>>of the emancipation project. At the end (basically creating an accord,
>>to avoid double-work and a fight about responsibilities) we decided a
>>CLEAR split who is responsible for getting which userland part out of
>>the closed part. The split was:
>>Joerg is getting /usr/bin/tar and /usr/bin/star
>>I, David Korn, Glenn Fowler, Irek Szczesniak and others work on
>>/usr/(bin|xpg[46]/bin)/(tail|tr|sed|od), /usr/bin/printf,
>>/usr/xpg4/bin/sh, /usr/bin/ksh and /usr/bin/pax (this was done to get
>>all POSIX/SUS things and related conformance testing from one upstream
>>with an uniform API, testing and a long term maintaince (AT&T's plans
>>for AST&co. are funded for more than the next decade (and likely
>>beyond)) and commitment plan) from a _cooperative_ _team_)
>>
>>I'm really upset about [4] right now...
>
> The sed proposal I'm making comes not from Joerg.  I do not feel we need the universe to be ksh93.

ksh93 is only a tiny part (e.g. "sed" as builtin to get better
performance and move towards a busybox-like integrated userland to
enable the use of OpenSolaris on embedded platforms).
More major parts is:
- Who is doing the long-term maintaince (as said AT&T has long-term
maintaince plans for AST which go beyond Glenn&&David)
- Who is doing standard conformance testing (as a side-note: The test
binaries I've send are from AT&T AST "head" and come from a different
alpha branch than the originally tested stable branch (I just didn't
expect that "tr" and "sed" in the alpha branch had issues. This is
beting fixed right now))
- Who is doing the porting to new architectures (if required) ?
- Who is doing the bugfixing (e.g. AT&T AST is a funded effort within
AT&T to provide a cross-platform toolchain for their own
infratructure) ? Who cooperates with Illumos to get the bugs fixed (as
said long ago AT&T has always been cooperative and even continued
working for OpenSolaris even Sun management was generating cross-fire)
?

> FreeBSD sed works, and is the basis for a certified implementation.  So I want to hear technical objections only.

Erm... I had a few of those, too.

> Also, illumos is not bound by any prior decisions that may no longer be relevant.

Grumpf... does that mean we have to throw two years of work away ?
Just like that, for nothing ?

----

Bye,
Roland

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