BlastWave.org Its an solaris community site.
Title
Blastwave.org - An OpenSolaris Community Site
Description
1. INTRODUCTION The "blastwave.org" open source software project has grown in popularity, complexity, offerings and expectation since its formation. This growth has been measured through the use of website traffic statistics, software usage, public response and requests via email traffic as well as requests for bug fixes. This growth has been consistent from month to month. The "blastwave.org" community concept and website were created by Dennis Clarke in response to a perceived need by Solaris users. The first concept that Dennis tackled, was the need for publicly available open source software that was maintained by members of the users community. To this end, the first community project hosted at blastwave.org, was the CSW packaging effort. This entailed more than just access to software via ftp or web download. This meant that access to the software maintenance process would be open to members of the users community. The needs of the Solaris user would be met by another Solaris user. What was needed was an open facility that would allow users to create the software packages for themselves. The "blastwave.org" web site was created to respond to this need. Those needs are now being met. Software "maintainers" join the organization via open invitation. Either we approach them or they approach us with a need. In most cases the need is mutual and then the access to the site is granted. The maintainer is then granted access to "build servers" as well as the necessary storage on the central "blastwave.org" NFS server. The maintainer is expected to conform to software package standards and the resultant software package is submitted for open review and testing by the members of blastwave.org before public release. The software package will be subject to review by the public and a bug reporting process is in place for feedback. These bug reports are assigned and then handled based on priority and severity. The software, upon public release, is delivered to the Solaris user by a number of "mirror sites" located around the world. The end user is not expected to manually ftp or http download a file, unpack and then install the software package as well as all its dependencies. This is seen as an unreasonable burden on the end user. The popular "pkg-get" software is used, so that the end user need know nothing other than the name of what they need. A simple command line entry by the user will result in the package being downloaded from a mirror site, checked for dependencies, then all of these software dependencies will be installed for the user. Most of the software packages will be configured for the user by scripts written such that the end user will be up and running instantly. The Apache web server package is very popular for this reason. The software packages are coordinated to work together, even across different maintainers. Our collection of apache modules is a fine example of this. A user can run a single pkg-get command, to install a working php webserver with openssl support, in one pass. Additional apache modules can easily be added via the pkg-get process. All the software is created and packaged for the x86 and Sparc Solaris user on a baseline release of Solaris 8. All the software packages must be available for both x86 and Sparc before public release. We review and test intermediate builds internally. The software is expected to be available as a 64-bit solution whenever it is possible and reasonable to do so. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. HISTORY The "blastwave.org" site and build servers were born out of a grassroots movement which had little in the way of resources. In the beginning, Phil Brown set up his pkg-get software repository and his initial set of about 50-100 packages. The maintainers list "quickly" grew to four people. The initial web site was created in less than a day with an old discarded Sun Ultra 1 server. The build servers were equally impressive. There was a single Ultra 2 with 200MHz processors and 256Mb of RAM. The x86 build server was a clone with 400MHz Pentium processors and 512Mb of RAM. We were very thrilled when the web server saw its first 1000 hits. That was the first month. As the word of our existence spread through the internet we rapidly saw maintainers join, create software packages and then respond to public bug reports with maintenance updates. We had found that there were many bright and motivated Solaris users that were happy to become the package maintainers for "their own software". They took personal ownership and pride in what they had built and were happy to defend its viability via maintenance and cooperation. Our need for internet bandwidth was not seen as a great issue as we seldom transfer large amounts of data. Then after six months we had three mirror sites and some fifty or so software packages for x86 and Sparc Solaris users. We had become a community open source site for Solaris users. Then came dramatic growth. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. THE PRIMARY PROJECTS The initial intent of the "blastwave.org" site was to provide Solaris users with equal access to open source software regardless of the users choice of architecture. We now see blastwave.org as an open source community site for Solaris users. 3.1 CSW - Community SoftWare Every software package is to be current and to be provided for the x86 and Sparc editions of Solaris. This is seen as a firm mandate. The initial members of "blastwave.org" debated on the base release to support and Solaris 8 was accepted for various reasons. The most obvious was cost. Solaris 8 was seen as being a very recent and affordable option for x86 users and Sparc users alike. We also knew that software that ran well on Solaris 8 would certainly run with the Solaris 9 release as well as Solaris 10. The Community Software project was thus begun. Initially the CSW project was the only real reason for the organization to exist. Recent progress with Solaris 10 has forced the addition of specialized Solaris 10 build servers. The maintainers have all agreed that we shall use Solaris 8 as our base operating release. We have also agreed that Solaris 10 is a special case and that dedicated Solaris 10 build servers are needed to support the FCS release. It is also clear that dedicated PowerPC build servers will be required for Blastware PowerPC port work. The simple creation of a software package which could then be offered to the public via FTP or HTTP download was seen as primitive. Debian Linux provides its users with the ability to simply get software via a facility called "apt-get". This script would allow the end user to simply type a command line and then the software and all dependencies would be downloaded and installed. We felt that this was a far more intelligent way to proceed. Therefore, Phil Brown wrote "pkg-get", a package downloading tool which eventually became a package itself: CSWpkgget. The end user could now select their software from a list with the command "pkg-get -a". The user may install all that is needed with "pkg-get -i softwarename". The most wonderful facility is the ability to update software, all software, with a very simple command "pkg-get -u". The last, and perhaps MOST salient point, is that the CSW project provides rapid response to the user community via software offerings, bug reports and fixes. Users did not need to wait for months to gain access to latest editions of software or for a bug report to be handled. The KDE 3.2.1 packages were created in less than six days from the day that the source was released. This rapid response ensures that we may offer Solaris users the most up to date software before any of the Linux distributions. We refer to this speed as "internet time". Critical bugs will be fixed within days. The CSW packages for Openssh and Openssl are popular for this reason. The CSW project has core maintainers and software projects. The admin and owner Dennis Clarke is responsible for all infrastructure that is required by the project. Philip Brown is the general director of the packaging project, at a software level as well as the primary creator of our standards for packaging and naming. We have a dozen members that are involved in specific "large software" build projects at various levels. The process of creating a large package such as KDE, GCC or GNOME needs input from a number of people to ensure a quality product. There are another eighty members that become involved as required or requested for their own software packages. A number of software engineers from Sun are now maintainers also and this has allowed for a gentle merger of the community programmers with internal Sun developers. All costs have been absorbed by Dennis Clarke personally. The admin labour is now easily sixty hours a week and night and day to keep everything functioning. There are also key software sets of primary importance. These are the "software development" tools and "common" foundation packages. These packages are used internally for some builds. The maintainers have decided that blastwave.org can offer these packages to Solaris users in revisions that are more current than that offered by either the sunfreeware.com site or by the Sun Companion CD Media. This sort of up to date software is demanded by the end user. Therefore the CSW project will expand to include primary projects such as GNOME and KDE by creating servers exclusive to desktop creation and maintenance. This division within the CSW project will aid in providing the most up to date software to the Solaris user. These dedicated project servers are needed because a Mozilla or KDE build can overwhelm the older build servers for days thus stopping or hindering other work. The software packages being created for Solaris Express and OpenSolaris are continually in a state of review. A state of non-stop build and rebuild of software for each release of Solaris Express or OpenSolaris code drop places a large demand on the core maintainers. It is clear that the FCS release of Solaris 10 must be fully supported and the CSW project aims to provide every major software title to the Solaris 10 user and on every architecture. To this end Blastwave has begun to test build systems that will allow for a complete nightly build of all software dependencies and then each strata of software package that is above those dependencies. This task is non-trivial but required in order to ensure a high level of quality. 3.2 OpenSolaris & Solaris Express Testing Each and every package that is created within the CSW project will be expected to run within Solaris 10. This expectation clearly requires software testing with the most recent build of Solaris 10. Therefore separate Solaris 10 servers have been required for testing by the maintainers. We feel that Solaris 10 build servers for each supported architecture is absolutely required as the Solaris 10 release will force the demand upon us. We fear that the 64-bit x86/AMD transition will occur without testing of our over one thousand software packages. Solaris Express testing is currently a struggle for the blastwave organization due to resource shortages. 3.3 Educational Projects It has been the intent of the author to provide an open facility for educational institutions. This would entail receiving proposals from research project leaders within universities and then providing the facilities for the project. These projects, presumably, will be only limited by computational and storage requirements. Network bandwidth to the internet will not be an issue as all experiments would be in a private network at the blastwave.org main site. The results of the research and development would be within the public domain. It is the opinion of the author that experimentation by brilliant minds is the foundation of invention. Projects that have been discussed are : 3.4.1 OpenSolaris Grid 3.4.2 Open Source Encryption based on chaotic dynamics 3.4.3 Solaris Documentation from a Community Perspective It should be noted that clear and user friendly docs for the average end user of Solaris are required. This process has been begun by the author but halted due to lack of funding. See: http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/stuff/sol10/book.html 3.4 OpenSolaris PowerPC Port - Polaris Key members of the Blastwave project are also members of the OpenSolaris pilot. The opportunity exists to port the Solaris OS to another RISC processor and to create an independent UNIX distro. While the x86 and Sparc distro opportunity seems to be far easier to achieve it would also be very common. The PowerPC port would establish a new market of UNIX users and be unique. This objective requires a separate project plan which can be easily integrated into the Blastwave infrastructure. The end result would be a base of Polaris ( the current distro name ) with the entire Blastwave software suite also. While we do have PowerPC hardware support from GENESI we do not have infrastructure to support the project. The BlastWare website has been setup as well as a Subversion source code repository at svn.genunix.org for the Polaris source tree. 3.5 Open Source Subversion Repository There has been a clear need expressed within the OpenSolaris and Solaris Community for a common knowledge base which will document the porting efforts of the software maintainers. With well over 1100 software titles in the Blastwave software set it makes clear sense to open up a Subversion repository that documents the changes and knowledge work of the software maintainers for the world. This would facilitate the open sharing of knowledge and ease the progress of Solaris developers in other projects. 3.6 Open Build Implementation After much discussion the Blastwave maintainers have agreed that a build system is required that will allow for the software base to be rebuilt without starting from ground zero. A large number of the dependencies and higher level software infrastructure components need to be rebuilt in order to verify functionality and interface stability. A key example is the Zlib library which has recently been rebuilt. The Zlib library is an underlying dependency to a very large number of other software components and the only way to ensure stability and quality control is to rebuild all dependants when a core dependency has been changed. A Sun Engineer has worked on a brilliant build system the now needs to be tested. Again, this progress is halted due to lack of resources. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. CONCLUSION The blastwave.org site will continue to grow with sponsorship and with a mutually supportive relationship with Sun Microsystems. The site has already become very important in Solaris open source software activities.
Contact
- blastwave.org
-
- Cobourg ONTARIO
- Canada K9A 5J3
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- +1.905373944
