Blastwave
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blastwave.org is an organisation which prepares and packages open source software for the Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system and also for operating system distributions based on OpenSolaris.
Blastwave is the home of multiple Solaris-oriented projects, including CSW or "Community Software for Solaris". The objective of the CSW project is to allow Solaris users to freely have pre-packaged open source software in accordance with specified standards. Software is in SVR4 compliant package format and ready to run via the simple pkg-get tool. This process includes a testing stage, open evaluation and bug reporting and final public release to an "unstable" and "stable" tree much like the Debian Linux project.
The “stable” tree is a collection of software packages that have all been previously released to the public and have no open bugs filed against them. The Blastwave Software Stack ( simply “the stack” ) is broken into three main trees of software packages. The first tree is called “unstable” and it changes frequently. Software packages are continually being updated and released to the public via the “unstable” tree. The next tree is called “stable” and it will only change after release engineering has checked and reviewed all bugs filed against all software packages. There is also an internal tree simply called “testing” and it is used for QA processes before a package enters the “unstable” tree. The “stable” tree will change only when a complete release is ready. At most this will be four times a year, depending on various factors. The most recent stable release is 2008-04 and it offers 1680 software packages.
The Blastwave build stack is a set of servers that houses the build environment. This stack allows members of the Solaris and OpenSolaris Community to gain access to both tools and expertise such that they may build software in accordance with standards. To date there are some 1,800 software packages for both the SPARC and x86/AMD architectures that support Solaris. The software is built to support Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 and Solaris 10. Solaris Nevada as well as Solaris Express Community Edition are not officially supported however the CSW software set is reported to work well. It should be noted that the older Sun hardware architectures are officially supported as well as the latest generation Sun UltraSPARC hardware and multi-core AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon implementations.
OpenSolaris based distributions may also choose to use the Blastwave software set. BeleniX is an OpenSolaris Distribution with a Live CD (runs directly off the CD). It includes all the features of OpenSolaris and adds a whole variety of open source packages. It can be installed to the hard disk as well. BeleniX is free to use, modify and distribute. BeleniX includes the ability to install software from Blastwave and thus greatly extends the users access to a well established open source software stack.
