[illumos-Developer] Information request: Using Joerg's fixes and contributions with Illumos or with an Illumos-based distro

[Sriram Narayanan]

Hello:

I'm neither as technical as most Illumos developers, not as clued in
on non-list conversations (if any).

Some of the members of the Belenix dev team have been using various
Illumos builds for several weeks, and we're happy to take things ahead
and base the next Belenix on a recommended Illumos build :) This is a
separate topic for discussion, and we're going to work closely with
the illumos-dev team on the recommended build.

My intent of this email is to understand what the issues are with
integrating Joerg's various contributions. I ask this for the
following reasons:
- I've seen some earlier technical discussions where Joerg's provided
patches (or at least I felt that he has)
- There has been some discussion on how these compare to other implementations
- He has provided technical input (as it has seemed to me) on other
people's implementations.

After a sudden silence, I have then seen conclusions by Garrett that
it's difficult to work with Joerg, and my understanding is that his
work won't be accepted.

Given that Joerg, the various active Illumos devs, and the Belenix
team all come from different cultures,  have different expectations,
and have varying levels of contribution, I want to ensure that we are
all on the same page, do the right things to be closely aligned and
fair to each other, and also end up working closely and set aside
differences eventually.

My questions:
1. Are there any technical reasons for rejecting Joerg's
patches/contributions (e.g. process to follow,  the contributions
would break compatibility) ?
2. In case the fixes would be really useful, but we need to request
Joerg to contribute these in a specific way (e.g. submission to a
patch system, etc), could someone please point out the desired process
?
3. For the next Illumos-based Belenix, are there are recommended steps
on using Joerg's tools what would both help Belenix be as closely
aligned with Illumos as well as be able to provide Joerg's various
tools (e.g. use of symlinks to Joerg's tools) ?
4. Should we discuss each of the above on separate email threads and
should these be public/private email discussions ?

Thanks.

-- Sriram

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Belenix: www.belenix.org