Garrett D'Amore wrote: > Hang on a sec. I think what I'm hearing is that it is now OK to accept > architecturally inferior software into Solaris if it already exists on > Linux. > ... > Are we just abdicating all engineering responsibility here, so that > Solaris will ultimately become a mishmash of various bits of FOSS of > differing quality? I really hope not! >
You mean like an editor that won't work on terminals wider than 160 characters? (that was Sun's vi until S10)... you mean like a version of awk that breaks if the lines are longer than (gasp) 255 characters? Like a packaging system that cannot handle installing dependencies? Like a clustering software subsystem that effectively disables use of all /proc tools on certain critical cluster processes? Solaris, like every other operating system on the market, has bright and shiny pieces and pieces that are by definition, good enough despite their obvious flaws and shortcomings. Many other operating systems users consider parts of Solaris that we haven't fixed for many years to be laughably out of data and non-functional. It turns out that there's a (perceived) large benefit to being compatible with other operating systems, and this has led us directly to including more and more pieces of open source software into Solaris. Some of those pieces of software are somewhat broken from some perspectives. Get over it. If you don't like the way it works, don't use it. I'd love to see you piss and moan over the code, and the bugs, in csh were that shell to be brought up for review as open source software today. Sun (and everyone else) doesn't have the resources to write a perfect OS; we don't have the people, we don't have the time. Figure out what you can do to make Solaris, and the other OSs using the same components as Solaris better. Hint - standing there and shouting "That can't come into the Solaris clubhouse - it's not perfect!" doesn't seem to be helping very much. If Unison is popular, then it's good enough. If no one ends up downloading those packages, they'll end up disappearing. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts "You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird."
