Well, aside from the sheer number of Sun people here, many of whom are very expert indeed, there are also plenty of other people with a lot of experience here. And there's tons of documentation, the Solaris Internals books, etc.
The Sun guys do have an additional advantage: aside from more context (such as not-yet-opened ARC cases and the like, to the point that the totality approaches a history of _why_ things are the way they are, esp. when combined with the memory of thousands of hallway conversaions), they also have e.g. a better bug database than what they make generally available. Some of that is just that they haven't gotten a better one in place for the rest of us yet; but some of it would always be that way, because some paying customers would report certain information with the expectation that at least the details pertaining to them be held confidential; so redacting all that to provide as much info as possible to the rest of us while still protecting customer confidences would be an expensive undertaking in its own right. And then there are bits of code that still aren't open, because Sun (even if they have them) doesn't have full rights to them. So some of the magic available to them is theirs and theirs alone. But much of the magic that is particularly theirs (plus a few other people) is earned expertise, not hoarded information. And as such, that's something anyone can aspire to. Use it, look up things and study the code first when you have a question (and if you have the time and enough idea where to look at that point), maybe take a course or read some books or whatever, and if you're up to it, someday the then newbies will be wondering where you got your magic. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
