On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:56 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> It would be better to go with the ATT AST tools >> (http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/). AST supports many of the >> BSD and GNU command line options missing in the native Solaris >> userland and conform to POSIX. > > If those tools are truly compatible with the GNU variants and track > feature changes with the GNU "upstream" (so to speak), then certainly > they are worth considering. However, the intent here is to be > compatible/familiar with the vast majority of UNIX-based systems where > new development is taking place. As far as I can see, those are > GNU/Linux and MacOS X systems. > > Although compatibility with current Solaris systems in also very > important, in order for OpenSolaris to survive (and not just stagnant), > it needs to move forward to embrace the audiences not currently using > it.
As I think has been mentioned before, I seriously doubt if you talk to most any UNIX user they are one bit about GNU grep vs Solaris grep vs BSD grep (or gnu tar vs solaris tar vs bsd tar vs star). What they care about is 'grep -r works' 'tar -xvzf works' etc. I think focusing on GNU vs Solaris vs Bob's box-o-shell-utilities is just a distraction. I also think the familiarity or 'moving forward' arguments (which are really nothing more than 'we need to do it because Linux does it') also miss the point. If that is your goal, we can get there a lot quicker by stopping all this work and all going to Linux. I think we can (and should) do better than that. Instead, I would propose that for those that just really cannot live without GNU everything, keep a copy in /usr/gnu/bin. For the rest of us, I would propose that the utilities used by default should: 1. Adhere to current ARC processes wrt to interface / behavioral / etc. stability (i.e. no gratuitous breakage). 2. Be fully integrated into OpenSolaris. This includes supporting all relevant OS features (such as NFSv4 acls on supported filesystems, etc.) 3. Support standard behavior (i.e. posix, etc) as well as any defacto standards (such as -z for tar, or -r for grep, etc.) What code is used to achieve this is really a matter of whoever wants to do the work. It might well even be a bit of a mix and match if that seems to be appropriate. Even it changes from GNU to AST to Solaris to BSD and back between successive releases, from an end user perspective, I don't care. I just want tar -xvzf to work, I want ACLs on ZFS to work, I don't want to upgrade and have my scripts break because flags were changed or documented behavior suddenly changed incompatibly. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
