At July’s London OpenSolaris User Group (LOSUG) meeting, Alasdair Lumsden invited various folks to the EveryCity office for a hackathon to start building a new distro on Saturday 31st of July, 2010. The hackathon was attended by folks from the LOSUG community in person and remotely on IRC from the OpenSolaris community at large (transcripts for day 1, 1&2. On the day, work began to attempt to build a distro from the published sources. I spent some time setting up the mailman instance (on Solaris 10 with Exim!) and creating various lists for use by the project that day.
Over the course of the next few weeks with the help with the help of Alan Coopersmith and Rich Lowe we attempted to build and document the various consolidations, Chris Ridd suffered the XNV (X11) consolidation which was the most painful to build due to missing components which were never pushed out publicly, if I recall correctly. I initially started on building the Sun FreeWare (SFW) consolidation and when that was done and documented, moved on to OSNET? (terminology might be wrong, I’m referring to the core-os consolidation). The confluence wiki wasn’t archive friendly it seems so trying to fish the initial documentation out from archive.org proved to be a bit of a challenge since the navigation menu wont load.
At some point Garrett D’Amore showed up on IRC and began lording it over us hanging out and I just wondered who is this person? as I saw OpenIndiana as Alasdair’s thing.
This was really my first actual involvement as a member of an open source project and I was very green, I recall that my patches to the SFW repo were committed by someone else but it wasn’t just being green on a technical ability level, it was also in my thinking. Thinking that another project that’s been around a little longer have a process down, why does anyone need to do anything different. That sort of rigid thinking would go on to receive heckles on more than one occasion 🙂 , many years later by Phil Harmon when a couple of us robots would attend to what followed LOSUG as Solaris SIG (Specialist Interest Group?) in London.
According to my mail archive, I handed over the mailman details to Alasdair a few months later, and left the project on 23 Nov 2010. During the few months on the project I made friends many of whom I still have contact with today. Chris Ridd, James O’Gorman, Andrew Watkins, Alan Coopersmith, Jeppe Fihl-Pearson, Peter Tribble, Andrzej Szeszo to name a few, but there were many more folks involved.
Apologies if I upset or annoyed anyone with my “obligatory F*ee*SD reference” comments in those days, I must admit it must’ve been quite nauseating.
Over the years, since leaving OpenIndiana, I have often wondered if things would’ve worked out differently if Garrett had been told to fuck off.