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May 2006 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter


Overview

For the OpenSolaris community, May was all about code contributions --- with almost twice as many integrations than any previous month. The community was also active in user groups and at conferences including the 2006 China ERC in Beijing and in San Francisco at JavaOne. Progress has also being made on SCM infrastructure. On tap next month? The community's one year anniversary.


Quotes of the Month

  • I agree with Sun's Bryan Cantrill that the FreeBSD port is indisputably useful. --- John Birrell, the developer porting DTrace to FreeBSD
  • This is great. It's great that Sun gives external contributors like myself the opportunity to put changes into Solaris. --- Peter Tribble, OpenSolaris developer.
  • The biggest, most obvious, and generally in your face, strategic enabler here is Sun's community development license.... --- Paul Murphy, reporter.
  • Jonathan Schwartz was telling people that all Sun software would be open source and the OpenSolaris folks were showing us how it could be done … --- Dave Johnson, Java developer.

Community Status

Projects & Communities


Community Highlight: BrandZ Takes Code Contributions

BrandZ is a community project seeking to provide a framework for system emulation using Zones. The first Brand is 'lx', which emulates Linux. The project has been open since December 2005. Since then we've released several updates and have taken some code contributions. Recently, Juergen Hannken-Illjes fixed three bugs that were impacting applications he was trying to run under BrandZ:

  • 6389317 clone()d threads using stdio may segmentation fault glibc
  • 6353934 SIOCGIFNAME must return Linux device names in BrandZ
  • 6391195 clone() CLONE_THREAD fails to return created thread id to caller
The first two fixes are currently available in the BrandZ project releases, and the third will be integrated in a few weeks. All three will be included with our final integration into OpenSolaris. --- Edward Pilatowicz


Conferences

  • OpenSolaris participated in the 2006 China ERC. See references with photos here, here, and here.
  • OpenSolaris community members participated in several activities at JavaOne in May, including the Freedom Toaster, a DTrace session, and a DTrace challenge at the Sun booth. There are some photos of various events as well. Also, Sun also recast the Java license at JavaOne to enable distributions on GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris.
  • SANE 2006, Delft, The Netherlands. Liane Praza and Casper Dik both spoke at SANE and held a BOF and "Guru-is-in" Session. The OpenSolaris ISO created by Stephen Lau was of particular use, and about 200 copies were distributed to conference attendees.

Contributions of Consolidation Code
  • May was a busy month for code. There were 18 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in May, bringing the total for the year up to 69. This month saw the first putback to a consolidation other than ON - congratulations to the Install consolidation!
  • Thanks to Henry Grebler, Yann Poupet, Juergen Keil, Stephen Potter, Rich Lowe and Hiroshi Nakano for the ON bug fixes. Also thanks to Sun ON engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Dan Groves, Eric Lowe, Alan Perry, John Levon, Steve Lau, Pete Dennis, Brian Utterback, Minskey Guo and Carol Fields.
  • Thanks to Peter Tribble for bug fixes for the Install consolidation and to Dave Miner for sponsoring the code through to putback.
  • You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

User Groups
Distributions Also Noteworthy

Technical Status

SCM Work

  • Milestones for SCM work were published.
  • ON SCM-related tool information was published to enable the community to engage in the work on tools that will be necessary as part of the transition to a new SCM system.
  • Conversation continues on tools-discuss about work in progress and plans. Sign up and join the discussion.
Website
  • Derek Cicero announced a new version of the application. Public-facing changes include the following. For detail about the changes, see Derek's email.
    • Page names are not required to be unique within their space.
    • Objects can have mixed-case names.
    • Search results will include a list of categories of results.
    • Multiple search results for the same blog entry will be aggregated.
    • The unused "Builds" feature has been removed.
    • Fixed TML bugs.
    • Changed several administrative features.
    • Jive message bodies will be displayed in a mono spaced font.

Community and Website Statistics

Registrations and Discussions

  • Steady as she goes: every week we continue to see 120+ new members of OpenSolaris.org. It will be interesting to see if and when this pattern changes.
  • There was a drop-off in the volume of discussions and blogs during the week of JavaOne: were our most vociferous community members all tied up in San Francisco that week? Intriguingly, in the same period we saw a record number of views on the Jive forums. OpenSolaris now has 114 discussion forums, and the total views and unique visitors to the forums continues to increase.


May's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio
How to Contribute: The OpenSolaris Newsletter is a community effort, and all community members are welcome to participate. Simply send news items to program-team mail list or the opensolaris-discuss mail list. The editor will keep track of contributions and list the names of participants in each issue. Also, the editorial team is looking for feedback on the content and format of the newsletter, so please feel free to suggest changes.