[OmniOS-discuss] Questions about - End the uncertainty -

[Dan McDonald]

> On Jul 7, 2017, at 11:42 AM, Guenther Alka <alka at hfg-gmuend.de> wrote:
> 
> hello Dan
> 
> Thanks for jumping in.
> You are the person with the very best insights in OmniOSand Illumos
> and propably OI. Can you please comment about the options to cooperate with OI.
> 
> Is this doable and wishable from your point of viewand how or do you have
> an alternative idea for a positive future of OmniOS ce or free Illumos
> based general use servers in general.Are there concerns for a project merge?

I had a unicast chat session with someone about this recently.

it's *POSSIBLE*, but remember the half the reason OmniOS happened in the first place was because OI focussed way too much on the desktop and all that accompanies it.  (The other half, not keeping up with upstream, was fixed by Hipster.)

I don't have the cycles to spell out how an OI/OmniOS merge MIGHT happen.  There are three big technical problems that come to mind:

1.) Package naming:  There are some subtle differences in IPS package names outside of illumos between the two.

2.) Perl & Python:  OmniOS picked dual-mode perl and dual-mode Python (64 and 32 bit).  Not sure what OI does.

3.) Installer:  I chose to abandon Caiman in no small part because it was far more bloated than it needed to be for OmniOS.  I wish I'd done Kayak for ISO sooner (or Theo or Eric did).  I believe there is a decent post-processing step that can be done for Kayak Interactive that can provide the functionality of the old Caiman or OI/slim_install.

Beyond that, there's the headaches of community coordination, etc.

All of this I don't have cycles for, I can say for sure.

Sorry,
Dan