# [OmniOS-discuss] Questions about - End the uncertainty -

Peter Tribble peter.tribble at gmail.com
Fri Jul 7 08:24:01 UTC 2017

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    On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 12:47 AM, Aurélien Larcher <
    aurelien.larcher at gmail.com> wrote:

    > It is good news, but I would engage you to discuss about reducing the
    > fragmentation in the illumos community.
    > We have a few distros maintained by 1-3 guys without any or much momentum
    > and much duplication of efforts (Debian has 1000+ devs working together and
    > we are barely able to have more than 10).
    >
    > We should join our efforts like, as I suggested, basing on common tools
    > and userland.
    > I do not see how wasting energy in duplicate efforts will help us
    > keep/gain momentum.
    >

    I don't actually see significant duplication of effort. In the case of OI
    and OmniOS, there's not much overlap because the work is in
    completely separate areas.

    Each community or distro does work that largely falls into 2 categories:
    work that's only relevant to that community, or work that, because it's
    all open source and published, can easily be picked up by someone else.

    > I mentioned earlier the possibility of a virtuous circle with OI as the
    > rolling testing and OmniOS the stable: to be honest I see very little sense
    > in maintaining two "testing" with such a small manpower. In the long term
    > this does not seem sustainable.
    >

    Attempting to coerce 2 projects together is even worse; each is then
    compromised by having to work not only to its own rules and schedule
    but has to fit in with the other project too.

    You have the relationship between OI and OmniOS inverted, I think.
    The only merge I can see making sense is for OI to rebase on
    illumos-omnios rather than illumos-gate - in which case OI is a downstream
    derivative of OmniOS.

    (The situation of OmniOS being the "stable" branch of OI is unlikely to
    work. Apart from the philosophical and technical incompatibilities, it's
    relatively easy to have an unstable/testing branch of a stable project,
    but it's hard to take a rolling testing project and build a stable project
    on top of it. Besides, that would require OI to do an awful lot of work
    in terms of backporting/release engineering/testing and the like that
    isn't directly relevant to them which would then have to be duplicated
    downstream as well.)

    Generally, if you have mature intelligent people forming communities
    they will naturally form reasonably optimal structures. People tend to
    make choices that make it easier for them to make progress. (Yes, it's
    a local maximum rather than a global one.) Telling people what they
    ought to do tends not to be well received; if you want to change the
    behaviour of people or the structure then you need to game the system
    to give people better options than the one they've currently chosen.

    Cheers,

    --
    -Peter Tribble
    http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
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