Haecceity

This is what I just wrote on Mark’s blog about Ian’s move to Sun:

“To some extent I’m quite excited by what this might mean for OpenSolaris going forward, but Nexenta have been pushing the OS/Debian (or Ubuntu, more accurately) integration kick for some while without actually seeming to get any (public) traction within Sun…
I’ve also been disappointed by how little Ian seems to be in touch with how linux development works these days, but that’s mostly from what he’s been writing in public, rather than any particularly interaction with him, so hopefully that’s not a fair summary.
I really hope that Sun can actually make this work.”

I thought I’d expand on this a bit, especially in light of my past moaning about Solaris and the installer and package management in the installer specifically.
What I really, really want, is a modern OS, which has an easily extensible and controllable installer, with good visibility and debugging infrastructure, which is very easy to manage on a grand scale - by which I mean hundreds or thousands of machines up to date, secure and consistent. At present, Ubuntu comes closest:

• d-i is a superb installer that is very easy to drive in an automated fashion – far easier than either kickstart or jumpstart in my opinion, even though both have been around far longer!
• People say apt-get, but that rather misses the point – or rather, it’s the icing on the cake. As most Debian or Ubuntu developers will tell you, the real strength of packages on the platform is in the underlying metadata, and the well maintained and enforced packaging Policy.
• Every packager is a specialist – more or less, if you’re packaging something in Ubuntu or Debian it’s because you use it, either professionally or personally, and have an interest in, and knowledge of, making it work as well as possible.
• The FHS – until my $PATH on Solaris is shorter than the next Harry Potter tome, Ubuntu has this won hands down.

However, there are some definite areas where Ubuntu or Debian (or Linux in general) struggle compared to Solaris – the sheer engineering resources that Sun can throw at a problem, and the talent they have available to them do result in fantastic results when they correctly identify a problem space. They also “own” Solaris – there’s no need for them to try and build awareness of a problem, and the correct solution, over a number of disparate communities.
ZFS and DTrace are the hackneyed and obvious projects here, but from a sysadmin perspective I think FMA, while far less sexy, is one of the best things Solaris10 has. And this is what I mean when I say operating system visibility.
The integration of Zones is also far better than Zen on Linux can offer currently, although both Red Hat and skx are working hard to fix this.
I’m really looking forward to the day when I get an OS that solves all these problems…

Yup, the long wait is finally over and thanks to a cast of thousands 2.2.3 is now in experimental.

I’d like to extend thanks to Mark and Canonical for sponsoring much of the original work, and also the sprint at the start of this year that got most of the remaining work done.

What we really need now is lots of upgrade reports so we can figure out how much automated help a 2.0->2.2 upgrade can reliably provide, and also where. I’ve been running these packages in production for some time so I’m not that concerned about overall stability, but I’ve not been using some of the weirder modules. We also need to get third-party module packages to stage updated packages into experimental built against 2.2

I had my first introduction to the Sol10 installer today. Oh My. For anyone who has ever complained that Debian is hard to install, go try solaris and then come back. Dependency resolution? Sure, we can tell you what dependencies you’ve missed. Then you get to go hunt around the appallingly laid out tree of packages (subtrees with one package in, no indication of what subtree a requirement might be in) trying to find the thing. Then you hope you’ve not missed something else, otherwise, repeat ad infinitum. And the granularity of the thing is just dreadful. I’ve ended up with all kinds of crap installed that I’ll never use just because something else that I’ll never ever use, but is a required package, depends on it.

And Heaven forbid that you should wish to search for something in the package list.

I walked back into our office and the Solaris Admin I share an office with tells me about all this cool stuff you can do, that is utterly undocumented in the manual as far as I can tell, that would actually be a really useful default, like Live Upgrades.

And don’t get me started on the package system itself, especially not when you have to throw the abortion that is Blastwave into the mix. Tim Bray has also mentioned just how good the Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is in comparison, and wonders why Sun aren’t investing quality engineering time in making it work on Solaris.

In contrast, the Ubuntu installer’s approach of installing the bare minimum and letting the packaging system do the work post install feels to me like the perfect method for installing a server.

Hub claims that Fedora moving Abiword and Gnumeric from Core to Extras is sabotage. Now, either dict is lying to me, or else Hubert is confusing “sabotage” with “rationalisation”. People really need to realise that distributions deciding not to have something explicitly in their core is not sabotage, it’s not a personal attack and it’s certainly not because we want to hunt down all the authors and string them up by their toes.
Rather, distributions (unless they’re Debian, but that’s a different ballgame) must rationalise what they put into their core - there’re only so many CDs that you want to put out!
Also, realise that moving something to universe/extras/etc is not a comment on quality; it merely reflects that the distro has taken a decision based on a variety of factors and is now implementing that decision.
Yes, of course it hurts when your pride and joy doesn’t make the cut, but move on from that learn that the only responses possible are: (a) give up entirely (b) make your project so kick arse it becomes the default choice or (c) go and work on the other project to give that the benefit of your expertise. A and C are kinda similar, but with very different end results.
I personally think that this need to have reasonable defaults and not overwhelm the end user with more choices than anyone could ever plausibly want will be a very good thing.
I’ve always felt that the fact free software makes it so easy to make “just another text editor” means that all the best ideas and the talent is lost in this zoo of competing products, whilst rationalisation by distros may discourage this a little and encourage people to collaborate on making really great software.
Of course, it’s also one of free software’s greatest strengths, and I’d hate to lose that. But a healthy balance needs to be struck, and at the moment, I think we’re still too far to the proliferation of competing projects side.

np: JET - Move On