Solaris Express Community Edition will be end-of-lifed

The moment is near where Solaris Express Community Edition will cease to exists in it´s current form. Glynn Foster announce Sun intent to do this in this mail at opensolaris-discuss:

Sun is announcing the intent to discontinue production of the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) by the end of October time-frame. As we intend to continue on a bi-weekly build schedule, consolidations will move towards producing native Image Packaging System (IPS) packages alongside SVR4 packages and then phase out the latter completely. Technologies such as IPS, Automated Install, Snap Upgrade and the Distribution Constructor will be integrating into a consolidation after following through the established processes including architectural (ARC) review.

I think, this move is a good one, as long as this move gives us a new distribution that complies to all ARC decisions and has binary-compatibility by default at least in a container (yes, i’m from the “GNU tools behind Sun Tools in $PATH”- fraction. I hate to degnuing my system. When i want some of the comfortable niceties of GNU-Tools i’m able to modify the $PATH myself ;)) But at the end this is an necessary step: We´ve said that a distribution like OpenSolaris will be the future of Solaris. And Solaris Express is the development release for for Solaris release. So at one point in time you have to convert all the old distribution mechanisms to the new ones. And with this move this step will be made. Update: You should read this article as well for some further information what this announcement really means.