Nicolas Williams wrote: > On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 03:41:21PM -0800, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > >> It seems *awfully* strange to me that we feel obliged to integrate a set >> of command line utilities which are designed to provide raw access to a >> hardware bus to the command line. >> > > I don't think that's trange at all. It's a useful debug aid at the very > least, and it may well be a useful integrator's tool for gluing things > together as well. > It isn't just a debug aid. Similar tools and libraries dependent upon those tools began shipping from Legato in 1994 because of lack of support within Solaris. As far as I know, they still ship, although they probably use sgen when available.
This Legato thing isn't just a random user package. This is a major backup package that Sun used to OEM. It still generated 500$M/yr revenue for EMC. Repeated discussions with Sun over the years pointing out both Legato's discomfort (*and* Sun's discomfort- at one point they were even maintaining the tools I believe) over using raw access in this way never really went anywhere. So please don't tell me I'm exaggerating. I know precisely whereof I speak.
