[illumos-Developer] What should Illumos comprise of ?

[Joerg Schilling]

Sriram Narayanan <sriram at belenix.org> wrote:

> Hello:
>
> Until some months ago, I used to consider it poor engineering that ON
> comprised of the kernel plus the userland, until I gathered from an
> earlier mail thread on this list that a number of userland tools are
> provided for POSIX compliance.
> Could someone confirm that this understanding is correct ?

There is the POSIX base standard:

	http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/toc.htm

and what ONNV provides is basically what the POSIX base standard defines.
This has been what UNIX sources did historically did include and for this 
reason, e.g. FreeBSD implements a similar set of commands for their basic 
source bundle.

BTW: as you can see, the named standard contains pax(1) and for compatibility 
with previous standards, e.g.:

	http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/

there is also a need to include cpio(1) and tar(1).

While previous AT&T UNIX sources and BSD (before 4.4-light) also included 
make(1), sccs(1) and the C-compiler in the base source tree, Sun did 
artificially remove a lot of parts from the OS base source code just to match 
internal company hierarchy structures.

Sun also later added a lot of code that does not really belong to the basic OS 
source.

I believe it would make sense to go back to the roots. This means: libm, make, 
sccs, archivers, ... belong into ONNV and some other sources could be moved to 
other consolidations. I believe that splitting sources should be oriented on 
logical dependencies and that ONNV after some time should be more or less 
self-contained.




Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily