Matthew Jacob wrote:
> Nicolas Williams wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 04:04:43PM -0800, Matthew Jacob wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
So I'm confused here. You've made some claims, which is that legato
needed this kind of package. I'll take that for granted. But what I
don't understand is *why*.
I freely admit I don't have years of experience with SCSI. But I do
work on device drivers for a living. I can't imagine a situation where
I need a shell utility to perform actions on a bus, *except* when I'm
doing debugging. And in those cases, honestly, I usually wind up either
downloading something or using a custom written tool. (Usually the
latter.)
I *never* ship any of those bits (the test bits) to my customers, nor do
I make my software depend on them. I have a hard time understanding why
these kinds of low-level tools would be provided by a 3rd party ISV to
users.
So is the architectural gap here a failure to provide tools that legato
needed to *develop* the software, or is it lack of building blocks to
build their software? (And if the latter, why does it necessarily
follow that CLI access is what is needed, as opposed to libscsi or the
like?)
Again, I'm just trying to understand the utility here to end users that
justifies integrating this as a first class package (with RBAC and such)
into Solaris. Why do ordinary end-users need this stuff? (Or even
ordinary developers. I don't include developers for storage products
because their needs are special, and I *suspect* they fall outside the
target audience that the "familiarity" justification was intended for.)
-- Garrett
