On May 8, 2009, at 7:43 AM, Mike Gerdts wrote: > On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Eric J. Ray <Eric.Ray at sun.com> wrote: >> >> On May 7, 2009, at 9:12 PM, Mike Gerdts wrote: >> >>> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Alexander J. Maidak <ajmaidak at mchsi.com >>> > >>> wrote: >>>> >>> >>> >>> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/sysadmin-discuss/2009-May/002703.html >>> >> >> Thanks, by the way--your contributions are really helpful over there! >> >> Mike's on the right track. The old code simply won't be opened, for a >> variety of reasons, most significantly that it simply doesn't make >> business >> sense to invest resources there. It's time to update the >> technology, and >> fixing the old, in this case, simply didn't make sense. > > From my standpoint, opening up pdo (patchadd) three years ago would > have made a lot of sense. The Solaris 10 re-write of patchadd removed > important functionality[1] and generates very verbose and confusing > messages. I'm pretty sure the sysadmin community would have been all > over fixing it several years ago if Sun would have been willing to > think of it as an open source component that applies mostly to Solaris > rather than a component that is almost[2] irrelevant to SXCE. That > opportunity has been lost and it is now time to move forward. > > 1. The (not-an-interface) return codes from patchadd in S9 and > earlier were clear and very helpful. To this day I would have a hard > time training a junior admin to understand the output of the S10 > patchadd.
Understood. > > 2. Not completely irrelevant because patchadd has been required to > apply patches to Sun Studio in SXCE to do OpenSolaris development. Well, shipping patch tools with OpenSolaris was an oversight on our part. Those won't be shipping in the next release, nor looking forward from there.
