OpenSolaris ARC Community
The OpenSolaris Systems Architecture community is responsible for the stewardship of the "architectural commons" for the various projects and consolidations that make up OpenSolaris. As such, its membership should come directly from the various project's and community's' leadership.
The primary goal of this community is to provide a high level systems engineering perspective to what we do, so we can easily develop multiple engineering projects in parallel and have them easily integrate with each other as part of a larger system, either as part of OpenSolaris, as part of a distro based on OpenSolaris or as an addition to an existing system that is itself based on OpenSolaris.
The makeup of this community and the specifics of what it does are still being invented; stay tuned to the opensolaris-arc discussion forum to participate.
The embodiment of this stewardship at Sun has historically been in the form of a group of project and community leaders called Architectual Review Committees (ARCs). As we bootstrap the OpenSolaris architecture effort, this concept is expected to morph into this Architecture Review Community.
Goals of this community
The OpenSolaris Architecture Community expects to spend its time and resources on architectural development and review, with a goal of helping to manage risk in OpenSolaris.
The focus is on understanding architectural *change* because change introduces risk; we look at *interfaces* because they are the mechanism by which we tie together the various components of our *systems*.
ARC Records
You can find records of ARC reviews, materials, and decisions (including materials for newly submitted and under review projects) in the ARC Case Log.
Partnership
This Architecture Community is made up of the leaders of the various other OpenSolaris communities. As such, it is expected to work together with these other communities to help them be proactive and "intentional" about the changes they introduce into OpenSolaris; the alternative is being reactive and out of control, making it difficult to produce and support complex systems.
When do ARC Reviews happen?
When reviewing a project from an architectural perspective, the reviewers are seeking to understand the architectural components and their interactions with one-another and with the rest of the system.
Architectural Review is not intended to be a design or code review. It is assumed that the project teams will carry these out as part of the standard development process.
This review takes place prior to a commitment by the community to actually accept the proposed change and make it part of OpenSolaris.
The ARC community's obligation is to determine whether a change, as proposed, represents an acceptable solution to the problem as stated in the original proposal (amended as necessary to reflect greater understanding of the problem) AND to express that determination in the form of a decision document called an opinion.