[Python-Dev] OpenIndiana and Solaris support

[Guido van Rossum]

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.)

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Trent Mick <trentm at 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)