On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 04:49:44PM -0600, Eric Boutilier wrote:
>> Just thought I'd better clarify this item from the The NetBSD
>> Foundation 2004 Annual Report:
>>
>>    ---------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>     Other noteworthy items:
>>
>>     * Sun will be using "some form of pkgsrc" for its contrib
>>       packages extras in Solaris 10.
>>
>>    ---------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> This is not the case. Quite a while back (a year or so?) there were
>> serious discussions about doing something like that with the
>> Solaris Companion CD (referred to above as "contrib packages
>> extras"). But then things got really busy (really, REALLY busy)
>> with the forthcoming release of Solaris 10 and the whole concept
>> got tabled indefinitely.
>
> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> I think it's a great pity that Sun missed the opportunity to have an
> up-to-date, intelligent third-party software management system. 
> It's not as if Sun have to do anything much beyond fixing third-party
> software to work on their platforms - all the hard-lifting has been
> done for them already.

Hi Alistair,

Yes, I agree actually, and going forward there is a fair
possibility that the Solaris Companion CD policy/process will be
going through some changes soon. So maybe the opportunity window
is re-opening. I'll report back when I know more.

On a related note, the 1st release of OpenSolaris -- which will
be a small subset of regular Solaris -- is coming out in a month
or two.  I don't know yet if there'll be enough there on which
to bootstrap pkgsrc, but if there is, an OpenSolaris + pkgsrc
"distro" would be possible.

Eric