Thanks for the reality check Trent! I think if enough people with core
committer bits want to keep supporting Solaris / Illumos / OpenIndiana
/ other variants that's fine, but I don't think that just having some
VMs to test on is enough -- we also need people who can fix problems
if those buildbots start failing, and that requires pretty specialized
knowledge. Plus of course we won't know if fixing it for OpenIndiana
will also fix it for Solaris 11 Express or for other Illumos forks.
(For Linux it's easier to assess these things because so many people
in open source use Linux and its many forks.)
The official requirement to support a platform is a stable buildbot and a core dev to keep the support up:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/#supporting-platforms. Victor has asked that the OpenIndiana buildbot be removed from the stable pool as it consistently throws MemoryError which means its support is not improving. If Trent is willing to maintain a buildbot in a Joyent VM that at least takes care of that part, but it still requires Jesus to volunteer to keep the support up if it's going to be supported for free. Otherwise Joyent could consider contracting with one of the various core devs who happen to be consultants to help maintain the support.
At minimum, though, a new buildbot could go into the unstable pool so illumos devs can keep an eye on when things break to try and get platform-independent changes upstreamed that happen to help illumos (e.g. no #ifdef changes specific to illumos, but if something just needed to be made more robust and it happens to help illumos that's typically fine).
On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Trent Mick <trentm@gmail.com> wrote:
> I work for Joyent (joyent.com) now, which employs a number of devs that work
> on illumos (illumos.org). We also provide cloud infrastructure. Would it
> help if we offered one or more instances (VMs) on which to run buildbot
> slaves (and on which volunteers for bug fixing could hack)? I know a lot of
> people in the illumos community would be quite sad to have it dropped as a
> core Python plat.
>
> Guido,
> Yes you are correct that Oracle owns the Solaris brand.
>
> tl;dr history if you care:
> - sunos -> Solaris
> - Sun open sources Solaris, called OpenSolaris (2005)
> - Oracle acquires Sun and closes Solaris (Aug 2010). Shortly after, the
> community forks OpenSolaris and calls it illumos (Sep 2010)
> - OpenIndiana is a distro of illumos (somewhat similar to how Ubuntu is a
> distro of Linux). Other distros are SmartOS (the one Joyent works on), and
> OmniOS.
> - Oracle continues work on Solaris, releasing "Solaris 11 Express".
>
> I've no real numbers of usage of illumos vs Solaris 11 vs others.
>
> Cheers,
> Trent
>
> p.s. I hear that Jesus is also in contact with some of the illumos-devs on
> IRC (and perhaps email). I hope we can help there.
--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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