StormOS will be taking a new direction. I've decided to stop backporting Jaunty and Lucid packages to our Hardy base and instead start pulling packages from Debian Sid. Yes, that's right - StormOS is rebasing on Debian Sid! This will make package porting much easier and it's also why the repo is now named 'hail' and not 'hardy' anymore. Which brings me to another big change in the way StormOS is developed.
Rolling upgrades. From now on StormOS is a rolling distro which means there will be no versions (apart from 'hail' which is our unstable branch). Instead you download the latest ISO which will be fully up-to-date and install that on your machine. From then on you just use 'sudo apt-clone dist-upgrade' keep the machine up-to-date.
Hail Beta 3 will also be put on hold for a little while. Instead I'll be releasing a NCP3 build fully updated with the Sid packages and the StormOS repository installed by default. It is my hope that other people will be able to use this ISO to join in with the development of StormOS. People with decent packaging skills can apply for an account on the server so they can push packages directly to the repo.
For the kernel we will use illumeOS when it is ready (currently it only supports OpenSolaris and not Nexenta or StormOS) with some custom patches to make it more source compatible with GNU/Linux so no time will be wasted having to deal with u_int32_t vs uin32_t and other very simple but tedious changes in many packages.
Yeah! I've been waiting for this day. I grudge upon the one that Nexenta turned to Ubuntu, and now the StormOS project is helping Debian expand even more to provide its multitude of packages to demanding users.
I've looked for this IllumeOS thing but it does not ring a bell so far. Any pointers?
Other than that, what are the steps needed to port a package to StormOS (now that it's going to be Debian-based)? A package recompile?
Hi there,
IllumOS (see http://www.illumos.org/) is Nexenta's effort to replace the closed binaries needed to build ONNV (the OpenSolaris kernel) with some open-source binaries. They plan to use this to provide their own fully open kernel as part of Nexenta Core Platform 4.
On StormOS you can build most packages with just recompile. Some packages will need some changes made to the headers and addition of some LDFLAGS but for the most part it is simple. I'm not the worlds greatest C programmer and I was able to port utils-linux over with relative ease.
Good to hear an update Andy. I like the idea of a rolling upgrade vs staged versions. Any rough idea of an ETA for the NCP3 build?
Andrew
I really like the idea of rolling release. ive hated having to upgrade so often on ubuntu (i never stay with the LTS editions, cause i always found each LTS i tried has at least 1 thing that really bothered me). will these changes affect anything with the brodeaux deal? this is the first time ive heard of IllumOS. seems like a good idea, especially with all the opensolaris stuff currently seeming to be fairly dead.
This will not affect the Bordeaux deal.