Tribblix Roadmap

It seems like only yesterday, but I put together a Tribblix scorecard about a year ago.

Tribblix keeps improving, of course. There have been a number of enhancements to the available software, and this continues with a steady stream of package updates.

Actual releases have been relatively thin on the ground. I managed to get Milestone 15 out in April, and Milestone 16 in September. It's about time for another one, looking at that cadence, and I don't really want to go much slower.

What constitutes a release anyway? For Tribblix, there are 2 things that can only happen at a release.

The first is updating the underlying illumos build - this is slightly artificial, but you can't really do on the fly updates of illumos, whereas most of the applications can be updated just fine. So that leads to a distinction between updating packages and upgrading the release.

The second is any structural change to the distro itself, including the way it's packaged and that packages are managed (so if zap changes that's a new release).

Note that adding packages, or replacing them with new versions, doesn't generally involve a release. Even if it's a fairly major package, it will simply be available when it's built.

Looking forward, then, what do I have in the pipeline in terms of releases and changes aligned with them?

Overall, the general stability of the Tribblix pipeline, and the fact that I've had managed to achieve many of the objectives I set myself initially, means that I'm reasonably close to calling it ready, and putting an actual 1.0 release together. What needs doing to make that a reality?

• Fully fledged and aligned SPARC support would be good. Not that it's necessary to align the release dates or support every piece of software, but what I need to be sure of is that a SPARC release isn't going to need breaking changes to the rest of Tribblix.
• Fixing the compiler baseline. I currently have a slightly tweaked gcc 4.8.3. I need to settle on a version (possibly a newer version) and untweak the configuration.
• Making sure that upgrades are solid. At the present time, they mostly work, but are a little clumsy.

There's a lot of devil in those details, but there's nothing massive there. And the result will be an illumos distro with regular updates and lots of the functionailty I expect.

Beyond that, I'm already making plans for Tribblix2. This is the opportunity for me to play with different ideas for how illumos could be used. And this ability to experiment with new ideas is one of the reasons I built my own distribution in the first place.

Think of Tribblix2 as more of a series of concepts rather than a single release vehicle. I can try things like removing 32-bit (and do it wholesale) to see what the benefits would be (and identify any drawbacks along the way). I can see how much of the legacy we currently ship in /usr can be ditched entirely. I can look further at projects like minimal viable illumos and minimal memory systems. It would be fun to see what happens if you apply some of the ideas behind Docker and Unikernels to illumos. Of course, successful experiments could lead to improvements trickling down to regular Tribblix.

OK, so it's not really a roadmap, but it should give an idea of where I'm heading.