Sun ending Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE)

From the

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Sun is planning on ending the production of its Solaris
Express
Community Edition (SXCE) by the end of October. SXCE is (soon to be – was) a binary release of the leading edge of OpenSolaris development. SXCE is updated every other week by Sun.

Though the actual ‘release’ is ending, development will continue. What this represents is really a packaging issue and a move towards Sun’s next generation Image Packaging System.

“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,” Sun’s Glynn Foster said in a mailing list posting. “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.”

So, if I understand this ‘discontinuation’ of SXCE correctly – if I want an updated OpenSolaris system, I’ll just have to download the last milestone release (as opposed to the SXCE build) and then update (with IPS) to the latest components.

As OpenSolaris is Sun’s Solaris Next this does make a whole lot of sense. IPS is Solaris’s future and it should be the default mechanism for updating the operating system too.