David,
We're actually focusing an enormous amount of effort on improving our
Solaris/JES patching and software management story [your original note 1]
1) Dave Miner is leading the Caiman effort around the new installer,
which will include patch/package management tools for Solaris (and
OpenSolaris). We're hoping to deliver new features in stages, and
there's already work going on to make the whole patch problem simpler.
2) We've delivered the Sun Update Connection (for Solaris 10 ff, but not
yet relevant for Nevada or Open Solaris) [2]. This allows Solaris users
to 'phone home' to Sun for the latest patches. The long term vision
there is that it will download and install the latest bits for all the
Sun technology on your system. There's also work going on to integrate
the Aduva technology [3], which will enable IT orgs to serve their
clients (so that 'home' in the 'phone home' scenario won't necessarily
be Sun, but might be your own IT organization). This will eventually
include the JES components, I believe. Yes, this is a 'fee' service.
3) Hardware support continues to grow. We tend to focus our efforts on
the systems that Sun delivers, but we're including relevant stuff from
the community. There's a short discussion of such a project at [4] to
include non-Sun drivers in SFW (though I suspect we'll still have the
'add the driver to driver_aliases' problem for a while).
4) $PATH - ah, a problem that does, to a certain extent, exist for
backwards compatibility reasons. We definitely have to fix this one.
It's on the list. If you have ideas about how that can be done, they'd
certainly be welcome!
Keep digging - I think we're all aware of the stuff that needs to get
fixed to really make OpenSolaris and Solaris useful out-of-the-box for
new users. It's a matter of focus and time to really make it happen.
thanks,
Bev
Director, Solaris Approachability Engineering
[1] David Orman's original post:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=9334&tstart=0
[2] Sun Update Connection: http://www.sun.com/service/sunupdate/
[3] http://www.aduva.com/
[4] http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=9017&tstart=0
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