Hi, Kristian Rink wrote: > Mark; > > thanks for the clarification on that. :) > > Mark R. Bowyer schrieb: >> Until 2008.05 came out, I was running Nevada on both my laptop and my >> Ultra 20. I now have OpenSolaris (the distro) on my laptop and Nevada >> on my Ultra 20, mostly to be able to compare, but OpenSolaris is so much >> nicer, that wont last for long. > > I can imagine. :) Comin' from Ubuntu 8.04, I found OS 2008.05 a rather > pleasant experience, the only "killer" thing I'd love to see though > would be a better GUI integration for some of the essential OpenSolaris > features (/me dreamin' of a "time-machine-like" nautilus integration of > zfs snapshots... ;) ). Will these OpenSolaris features, however, make it > to Nevada one day or will OS (as a distribution) and Nevada (and its > successors) always remain two completely different shoes?
I'm not really in the right bit of Sun to answer that. My understanding is that Solaris Next will look a lot more like OpenSolaris than it looks like Solaris 10 right now, though. For instance I believe the packaging system will be the new pkg, rather than the old pkgadd. In the longer term, I think the idea is for OpenSolaris to be the bleeding edge, and every now and again a build is taken and badged as a Solaris release, with all the extra testing and baggage that entails. The commercial Solaris releases have to provide a level of compatibility that doesn't really merge well with the Open Source ideal, however. Solaris 10 is sticking with the versions of Gnome and other libraries it initially shipped with to ensure binary and source compatibility, and any required bug fixes are ported back to that. And if you were an ISV, paying to test your software on every release you supported, that's what you'd want. The few Nevada projects that have been back-ported to Solaris 10 Updates have been well received by most, but have also caused some unforeseen pain for others, as interfaces have had to be changed in small ways to implement them. Sun don't seem to plan to risk that again, and so we'll need a Solaris Next release fairly soon to allow all this fantastic work out to the customers who demand the full Solaris platform, with all the support and compatibility guarantees that entails. That is after all one of the main things Solaris has over Linux, beyond the technology. Until recently my old SunOS binary of Mozaic 0.9 beta still ran on a Solaris system, although it's ability to render pages became less and less useful ;O). Try running a 10 year old binary on a current Linux system. And yes to the Time Machine like interface to ZFS Snapshots - I'd love to see that too. In fact when I first saw a Time Machine demo (and I type this on an iMac) my first thought was that it *had* to be based on ZFS Snapshoting, and was really disappointed to see how ugly it is under the hood. And how unreliable it's been until the latest update. Although I have had to do a complete reinstall through it once already, and it worked brilliantly =O) But now - this being OpenSolaris - there is absolutely nothing to stop you writing such a thing yourself ;O) Ta, Mark. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
