Tribblix scorecard

I was just tidying up some of the documentation and scripts I used to create Tribblix, including pushing many of the components up to repositories on github.  One of the files I found was a quick sketch of my initial aims for the distro. I'm going to list those below, with a commentary as to how well I've done.

It must be possible to install a zone without requiring external resources

Success. On Tribblix, you don't need a repo to install a whole or sparse root zone. You can also install a partial-root zone that has a subset of the global zone's packages. (Clearly, adding software to a zone that isn't installed in the global zone will require an external source of packages, although it's possible to pre-cache them in the global zone.)

It must be possible to minimize a system, removing all extraneous software including perl, python, java.

Almost successful. There's no need in Tribblix for any of perl, python, or java. There are still pieces of illumos that can drag in perl in particular, but there is work to eliminate those as well. (One corollorary to this aim is that you can freely and arbitrarily replace any of perl, python, or java by completely different versions without constraint.)

It should be possible to upgrade a system from the live CD

In theory, this could be made to work trivially. The live CD contains both a minimalist installed image and additional packages. During installation, the minimalist image is simply copied to the destination, and additional packages added separately. As a space optimization, I don't put the packages in the minimalist image on the iso, as they would never be used during normal installation.

It should be possible to use any filesystem of the user's choice (although zfs is preferred)

Success. Although the default file system at install is zfs, the live CD comes with a ufs install script (which does work, although it doesn't get uch testing) which should be extensible to other file systems. In addition, I've built systems running with an nfs root file system.

It must be possible to select which versions of utilities are to be installed; and to have multiple versions installed simultaneously. It should be possible to define one of those installed versions as the default.

Partially successful. The way this is implemented is that certain utilities are installed under /usr/versions, and it's possible to have different versions co-exist. I've tried various levels of granularity, so it's a work in progress. For example, OpenJDK has a different package for each update (so you can have 7u71 and 7u75 installed together), whereas for python I just have 2.7 (for all values of 2.7.x) and 3.4. There are symlinks in the regular locations so they're in the regular search path, which can be modified to refer to a different version if the administrator so desires, but there isn't a built-in mechanism such as mediators - by default, the most recently installed version wins.

It must be possible to install by functionality rather than requiring users to understand packages. (Probably implemented as package groups or clusters.)

Success. I define overlays of useful functionality to hide packages, and the zap utility, the installer, and the zone tools are largely based around overlays as the fundamental unit of installation.

It should be possible to use small system configurations. Requiring over 1G of memory just to boot isn't acceptable.

Success. Tribblix will install and run in 512M (with limitations - making heavy use of java or firefox will be painful). I have booted the installer in slightly less, and run in 256M (it's pretty easy to try this in an emulator such as VirtualBox), but the way the installer works, by loading a full image archive into memory, will limit truly small configurations, as the root archive itself is almost 200M.

It should be possible to customize what's installed from the live CD (to a limited extent, not arbitrarily)

Success. You can define the installed software profile by choosing which overlays should be installed.

Overall, all of those initial aims have been met, or could easily be met by making trivial adjustments. I think that's a pretty good scorecard overall.

In addition to the general aims for Tribblix, I wrote down a list of milestones against which to measure progress. The milestones were more about implementation details rather than general aims (things like "migrate from gcc3 to gcc4", "build illumos from scratch", "become self-hosting", "create an upgrade mechanism", and "make a sparc version", or "have LibreOffice working"). That's where the "milestone" nomenclature in the Tribblix releases comes from, although I never specified in which order I would attack the milestones, it just makes for a convenient "yes, I got that working" point at which I might put out a new iso for download.

In terms of progress against those milestones, about the only one left to do that's structural is the upgrade capability. It's almost there, but needs more polish. Much of the rest is adding applications. So it's at this point that I can really start to think about producing something that I can call 1.0.