[OmniOS-discuss] The Future of OmniOS

[Robert Treat]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 4:07 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 12:21 AM, Robert Treat <robert at omniti.com> wrote:
>>
>> I hope the answer to the best safest place is OmniOS. To that end, we have
>> no plans to stop running OmniOS at this time, and presuming the project can
>> make the jump to community maintainership, we won't need to develop any.
>
>
> So, assuming such a jump were to happen, what are we talking about?
>
> (My comments here, btw, are from me as an illumos community member
> and maintainer of another distro, rather than as an OmniOS customer.)
>
> Some items:
>
> The OmniOS name/brand
> The website/wiki
> The illumos-omnios fork (the code)
> The github repos (the infrastructure)
> The pkg repo servers
>
> What happens to those? The real question here is whether they stay,
> with community maintainership, or whether the "new" regime is an
> independent fork? I would guess the latter to be the safest course.
>
> That's assuming a world in which OmniOS-whatever remains as a separate
> entity, rather than taking the view that you throw it away and replace it
> with
> a stable branch of some other distro. I'm not entirely convinced that would
> (a) actually work, and (b) not compromise the other distro.
>
> So that gives you a newly forked project that maintains a distro based
> on the current OmniOS code (preserving the effort that the likes of
> Dan have put in to get LX running), pulling in updates from illumos
> and the other upstreams, with the same sort of release cadence
> and update approach (so you know you're going to get security updates)
> we have at the moment.
>
> Ignoring the who and how for now, would that be what people actually want?
>
> Or are people looking for a different future?
>
> My personal (illumos/Tribblix) selfishness here is twofold; first, I want
> to ensure we keep the current codebase as a going concern (as an
> unmaintained museum it's not interesting), and secondly an active
> project shows the health of the illumos ecosystem in a better light.
>

My opinion is that the most likely to succeed path forward is to keep
OmniOS as OmniOS, just with a more open / decentralized management
structure. Most of what we need is already in place:

- The code is on github, and we can either add committers into the
current group, or move it to a whole new github project space (we
actually wanted to do this, but OmniOS was taken, so it always got
back burnered).

- We can (and should) move the wiki to github. It's currently running
on some proprietary-esque software which is EOL; again, lack of round
tuits to fix this, but if anyone wants to take a stab, we believe the
following script can be used to scrape the content into a github
suitable format: https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/trac2md

- the pkg repo is trickier, but I think the simplest answer is
probably for us to donate hosting for that for the time being,
although there may be others in a better position to offer that.

- with regard to name / brand; Right now it's sitting in a safe place,
but I think eventually the right answer would be to turn ownership
over to a non-profit, probably a small group as an affiliated project
of one of the larger open source non-profits, but it isn't worth the
hassle until we know we have a sustainable project.

What we need most at the moment are a small group of folks interested
in doing active development / code reviews for upcoming bug fixes and
such from other illumos distros, and I think a small group of people
interested in doing infrastructure management (ideally around as many
community available resources as we can).


Robert Treat
https://omniti.com