> On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 1:50 PM, UNIX admin > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [...] > > Correct. Except that on GNU/Linux, there is no such > thing as guaranteed stability or garanteed forward / > backward compatibility. And that's where the > practices significantly differ. > > > > You see, if you don't care about guaranteeing the > above, then you might as well go and just stuff > everything in /usr; but if the software *isn't* > yours, like in the case of OpenSolaris, and your > policy is to guarantee stability, then you can't just > go and stuff software from someone else into /usr, > because it might break other things and might bust > your customers and/or consumers. > > > > And for Solaris, such practice is simply > unacceptable. And as long as that remains the case, > Solaris will have people like myself on his side. > > Which is exactly why Solaris is an enterprise OS and > Linux is not. It > has very little to do with the technical merits of > the OS, and > everything to do with the design decisions of the > Linux > community/vendors. Breaking forward/backward > compatibility is simply > not acceptable without A VERY GOOD REASON.
I'm not sure I'd agree entirely - I think professional engineering discipline, and even centralized authority, or at least review, can have very broad ranging benefits. Or from the other angle, that ultimately the "technical merits of the OS" _are_ nothing more than the sum of all the "design decisions", so that the latter will always affect more than compatibility. Take the whole memory overcommit by default fiasco in Linux as an example; on _what_ planet is non-deterministic failure a reasonable trade-off for going further with less before something fails? Whereas Solaris does the right thing by default, but if a program is specifically willing to accept the possibility of asynchronous failures, it can choose to use MAP_NORESERVE to put only itself at risk of same. IMO, both Windows and Linux share a desktop-first legacy. Both _can_ be configured as something more nearly approaching enterprise-grade, but you have to know to do that, it's not the default. A sonnet is often a better poem than free verse, simply because the constraints of the form challenged the author more deeply. A PG-13 horror movie depends more on writing, directing, or acting to be scary, while an R (17 or older) rated movie typically just throws gore and sex at the problem, to the point where they're all the same after awhile. So also additional design and development process constraints might also affect the quality of an operating system. Which is not to say that the not-quite-anarchy of some open-source projects might not produce results _faster_. I think that just moves some of the problems out to the whole separate layer of distro maintainers though, so that there's someone to make sure that everything more or less all works together. I suspect that once you get down to reasonably serious uses, you have a commercially maintained distro from (for example) Red Hat or Novell that's not significantly more up-to-date than Solaris 10 updates are from Sun. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
