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

[ken mays]

--- On Sat, 8/7/10, Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org> wrote:

> From: Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org>
> Subject: Re: Closed-bin accords of the OpenSolaris conference... / was: Re:  [illumos-Developer] illumos_145 i386 build status
> To: "Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at nexenta.com>
> Cc: Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de, maybird1776 at yahoo.com, garrett at damore.org, developer at lists.illumos.org, "John Plocher" <john.plocher at gmail.com>, "I. Szczesniak" <iszczesniak at gmail.com>
> Date: Saturday, August 7, 2010, 4:15 PM
> 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

Hi Roland,

I think it is a worthwhile effort with longevity funding behind it and with a 'team' of people working on it.

As Olga once said:
"...the goal is to have only one implementation at the end
(lets call it SUNWposix-core), one which is a maintained, modern, very
fast, conforms to POSIX, SUS, passes UNIX branding requirements... implements commonly used BSD and GNU features and supports a wide range of systems from very small 16 MB ARM embedded machines scaling up to very large servers with 16 TB or more."

My interest lies in the testing suite and current situation with things like ksh93+ and the ast* suite.

~ Ken Mays