MOTION TO THE OPENSOLARIS.ORG OGB: CREATON OF THE OPENSOLARIS SOFTWARE PORTERS COMMUNITY
Motion to the Board: Proposed Community Group Creation
Summary
The OpenSolaris community could profit a lot from a new Community Group
that would coordinate and organize the multitude of efforts to port
software to the OpenSolaris Platform, without actually changing their
scopes or behaviors, but creating a central space where any interested
party can find each and all needed so he can port software, port
drivers, find ported software etc ..
Scope
The proposed Software Porters Community Group shall be the group that
coordinates, advocates, encourages and helps with the porting of
Software from multiple Platforms to the OpenSolaris Platform. This is
neither a proposal for a new packaging system, nor for a new collection
of software (therefore it neither is something like blastwave, nor in
its core the same like the migration community suggestion which both
want to work on specific ways of porting/packaging). Its a proposal to
create a community of porters, advocates and advisors that will help
people who want to port software, advise them, create documentation and
maintain links and resources about the many different places you can
find information and ported software. This will be handled in a way
that shall be independent of religion and politics regarding amongst
others the way packages are done o if sunstudio or gcc are the better
way to do things.
The OpenSolaris Software Porters Community will actively work to
collect from all the other projects involved in porting software (like
desktop for example) all information regarding their work and be the
central point of information regarding all things porting and ported
software to OpenSolaris.org.
We would also like to establish processes and resources to provide
porters with resources necessary to do their work, talk to sponsors,
work on getting gear where porters can test and create their ports etc.
Example of Projects this community would want to start are:
- Create and maintain a database of porting projects (SFE, Sunfreeware, blastwave, IPS, Opensolaris.org SFW…..)
- Create and maintain a list of links to all information available
about porting software to solaris/opensolaris/Indiana/whatsitsname
- Create and maintain a database of documents related to the same
- Create new documentation, which helps and explains how to port software to the aforementioned
- Try to create a pool of resources for porters (ask sponsors for CPU
cycles, repository space … … … ) maybe modeled after opensuses build system ?
Rationale
There are many reasons a central Community for Software Porters is
needed. First and foremost because information and interoperation is
scattered around. Secondary reasons are as follows (this is just a
short list):
No central place for information exchange for porters
No collection of information how and with which tools it is easiest to port
A lack of reasons for people to port (why should I include solaris in my platforms ?)
Porting seems to be scattered around different projects and
communities, partly in desktop, partly in SFW, partly external with
SUN, partly with Blastwave.
There is no activity currently noticeable to encourage OpenSource
projects and also Closed Source developers to port their software to
the OpenSolaris platform. Strangely enough we have often seen that
people get told that its complicated, a lot of work, very hard to do
and information not available.
In addition, none of the existing Community Groups are properly scoped
for the kind of decisions that need to made to by a knowledgeable,
focused group of individuals whose primary interest relates to the
production of software that runs on the OpenSoalris platform.
Proposal
The core of this proposal is to:
Create a Software Porters Community Group
Create a Software Porters Information Portal (the central place for everything porting to solaris)
Start evangelizing porting to OpenSolaris at FOSS and non FOSS conferences and shows.
That the following individuals be considered for the initial set of
core contributors (all have been asked and confirmed their readynes to
become core contributors):
Michal Bielicki (cypromis)
Damian Wojslaw (trochej)
Michal Pryc (migi)
Michael Jerris (mjerris)
Proposed Contributor List:
Kristopher Januszajtis-Neale
Ed Pimentel
Alexander Feldman
Jay Fenton (jfenton)
During the discussion about Project or Community there have been more
requests from people who would be ready to become contributors, I will
update this list during the next days with their names and
opensolaris.org id’s
I would ask the OGB consider this proposal two weeks from February 15th, 2008
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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