NEW POLL: What OS port should be next?

[KevinH]

Well it's been some time since our last poll, so we decided to close that poll and publish a new one with all the *other* options folks mentioned in the comments now added to the poll.

We've also released a few more ports since our last poll:

- Fedora Core 4
- OSX
- SUSE ES9
- SUSE 10

You can always get the latest devloper builds via SourceForge. We tend to release new ones once a week.

We've also opened up a read-only CVS tree for those who want to live on the edge. This also comes in handy when trying to build/run Zimbra on a OS which we don't have binaries for yet.

Remember Zimbra in general is *very* portable. Requires only Java, Postfix, MySQL, PERL, and few other dependencies. So for the most part a *port* of Zimbra is just a re-compile of the dependencies and some packaging magic.

We here at Zimbra would love to be able to ship/produce Zimbra binaries for all the OS flavors out there, but with limited resources it's just not practical. So first and foremost we port to OS's which our customers are likely to run, and secondly to OS's that our community shows interest in.

Please only comment on this thread if your OS is missing from the poll. A million comments saying "+1 <my favorite OS>" just annoy our port/build master.

[marcmac]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Please only comment on this thread if your OS is missing from the poll. A million comments saying "+1 <my favorite OS>" just annoy our port/build master.

+1 DBG, please...

[zaf]

No more OS ports are necessary, all the important ones are supported

[marcmac]

Let the flame wars begin.... sheesh.

[zaf]

Originally Posted by marcmac

Let the flame wars begin.... sheesh.

Well, here's my reasoning for saying that:
You're already supporting an enterprise Linux, as well as MacOS. You also provide the source. Trying to support an install on Windows is a huge undertaking, especially for an OS that's going to cost the user much extra on Licensing fees anyway.

Hobbyists are free to compile the source on anything they want, and they'd be happy with that. An Enterprise is going to most likely dedicate a machine to running Zimbra. If they're dedicating a machine to it, then they shouldn't have any problem choosing from the list of what Zimbra already supports.

That's why I think that spending dev time on other platforms is a waste. I could be wrong -- enterprises may want to stick with their standard server environment -- but I think for the most part (for Linux), that's RHEL anyway. If there were to be any other, it would be SuSE.

[marcmac]

Originally Posted by zaf

Well, here's my reasoning for saying that:
You're already supporting an enterprise Linux, as well as MacOS.

But not intel mac (yet, v. soon). And no 64 bit builds yet. And no Solaris, yet.

You also provide the source. Trying to support an install on Windows is a huge undertaking, especially for an OS that's going to cost the user much extra on Licensing fees anyway.

no postfix on windows, so it's a non-starter

Hobbyists are free to compile the source on anything they want, and they'd be happy with that. An Enterprise is going to most likely dedicate a machine to running Zimbra. If they're dedicating a machine to it, then they shouldn't have any problem choosing from the list of what Zimbra already supports.

That's why I think that spending dev time on other platforms is a waste. I could be wrong -- enterprises may want to stick with their standard server environment -- but I think for the most part (for Linux), that's RHEL anyway. If there were to be any other, it would be SuSE.

Actually, we see a lot of debian requests - SuSE is much more prevelant in Europe, I think.

And we've got one guy running it on his own hand-rolled distro. Though the setup wasn't exactly smooth...

[onkelfusspilz]

Hi,

gentoo has taken the lead with grate prominence and I don't think that it's an accident.
I use gentoo on all my servers for years and can't change that. Please support gentoo, the porting should be easy (just create a set of ebuild install scripts, the gzipped tarballs can be used as archives).

Is there any chance?

Thank you!
Andreas Piening

[marcmac]

Gentoo, as I understand it, is for bleeding edge folks who like to build things themselves.

We provide source. Build away.

Enterprises, who are our target (remember, we're a company) aren't likely to deploy on gentoo.

[antonio.meireles]

On the established OS scene a porting to Solaring (both x86 and SPARC) would be a good fit.

On the bleeding edge, bet on the future, i 'd sugest a port to rpath's Conary, the new venture started by Erik Troan, of RH' rpm fame, and AFAIK the linux packaging technology to follow atm. The appliance model beeing advocated by conary seems a very good fit to zimbra. More, it would simplify a lot installation, and future upgrades... [Since Zimbra announced an Asterik partnership with digium, just ask them why are they interestes in conary based asterik 'appliances']

My .2 €uros


Best regards, and keep the damn good work


António

[Zingra]

Originally Posted by marcmac

Enterprises, who are our target (remember, we're a company)

That should be reason enough for a Solaris port.