[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS doc

[Chris Siebenmann]

> I do believe, and someone here mentioned this to me offline, that we
> might need to promote OmniOS a bit more. I'm not sure how best to
> do that, modulo people like the folks here telling their managers,
> friends, and customers about how OmniOS, quite simply, Helps You Solve
> Problems.

 One problem with doing such promotion today is that for quite a lot
of people, OmniOS does not solve your problems but is instead just
a building block for doing so. This is distinctly different from,
say, FreeBSD or a random Linux distributions, which *will* solve many
people's problems out of the box. Here I'm talking about problems like
'I need a mail server' or 'I need an IMAP server' or 'I need a web
server' or 'I need a DB server'.

(I am on the mailing list for Exim, and I can assure you that there
are many people who show up there wanting an out of the box 'solve
my problems' experience with Exim on their system, even for unusual
problems. These people have not even seriously read the documentation
for Exim.)

 I understand and accept that OmniOS is never going to explicitly
package such things. What I think would help here is a curated list of
additional package sources with explicit 'where to get <X>' for popular
<X>s. This would give people who want their problems solved an easily
found and explicitly documented two-step process for doing so, in
contrast to the current approach where you get to do a bunch of searching
(and experimentation and guessing about which is the right package source
to use and so on).

	- cks