Indiana 1-pager
From Genunix
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Project Description
Indiana is intended to be a product - an OpenSolaris distribution with a regular release schedule.
Project Team:
Needed...
Risks and Assumptions
The relationship between Indiana and the other OpenSolaris Distros is unclear, as its relationship with Sun's various Solaris releases.
There is probably a dependency on the Emancipation project.
Unresolved issues include release binding, compatability and stability constraints, etc.
We assume that we can start with an existing distro and work on improving it rather than starting from scratch.
Business Summary
Problem Area
Think of this as the next natural step in the open sourcing of Solaris that began in 2005. In other words, the source has been in the community for a while, and now we're moving the binary version and related machinery into the community too. Why? Because even in open source, it's the binaries that people want. Furthermore, we're not presenting OpenSolaris as crisply as we could be.. In particular, people familiar with how Linux works (and that's A LOT of people) hear the name "OpenSolaris", assume it's the community version of Solaris, and are confused to find out that isn't actually true.
This is actually just one part of what I've been referring to as "the familiarity problem" (formerly known as "the usability gap" until I realized that "usability" was relative). I.e., that while Solaris has compelling technology, that technology remains somewhat inaccessible to users that are familiar with the Linux environment (and, again, that's a BIG market). Addressing the familiarity problem is another big goal of the Indiana project. In other words, the goal is to make what Solaris has to offer available to the larger market that by and large is more familiar with Linux as things stand today.
Market/Requester
Ian Murdock/Sun Marketing?
How will you know when you are done?
There will be a new "Indiana distro" available every 6 months.
Technical Description
So, what will be the big features in Indiana? You tell me--and, indeed, a discussion of features could be a great way to actually get off on the right foot here given the somewhat rocky start so far.. My list: packaging, installation, GNU userland alongside "Solaris classic userland", and laptop support (see what I mean that there are already people working on these things?).
The big feature from my point of view though is the 6 mo. timed release cycle. Timed release cycles have done wonders to introduce predictability into other open source projects (e.g., Gnome, Ubuntu). And 6 mos. is the clear winner in terms of frequency among Linux community/developer distros--it's just enough time to do interesting work AND have a reasonably long hardening period so the thing is stable.
Details
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In Scope
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Out of Scope
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Packaging & Delivery
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Dependencies
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Resources & Schedule
Prototype Availability
Using agile development methods, we would like to start a sequence of develop/feedback cycles to refine this proposal, validate our initial assumptions and clarify constraints. We expect to form an initial project team, select a base distro and do some initial experimentation within the next couple of weeks.
