Hi Brian, Thank you for pointing this out and articulating it well. This is the kind of leadership that's missing with OpenSolaris right now. I don't think the community as whole really understands what the direction, standards, etc. are that we are trying to build upon. That makes it harder to jump on the bandwagon and make changes. Otherwise, it becomes too organic and disorganized. Ideally, I think we should be looking at making a unified userland that builds upon the SUSv3 as the base and add Solaris, BSD, GNU features as icing on the cake. Having a strong foundation in standards has been a great selling point for Solaris in the past and enabled ISV's to port applications and governments to develop software that has longevity due to established API's. We should build on that.. not just throw our arms up and say "Linux is GNU.. we should be too". For now, I do like the idea of having /usr/bin, /usr/xpg4, /usr/xpg6, /usr/ucb, and /usr/gnu. We're giving people a choice. The question is.. what should the default be? Well ultimately, I think we can break this down..
Do we own the GNU toolset? NO Do we or Sun have control over what gets into the GNU toolset? NO Do we have a say in what the GNU API or standards are? NO Do we have control over what gets into the Solaris toolset? YES Do we have a say in what the Solaris API or standards are? YES Pretty simple, if you ask me:) If the problem is that we don't have volunteers or Sun employees to pick up the slack on the native Solaris/OpenSolaris userland.. then lets focus on fixing that and getting people involved. I'm sure we've seen enough ppl mention ideas and even fixes they'd like to contribute. Sounds like a community effort.. so lets work as a community to make it so:) Star is a great example of something that supports multiple standards and does the job. Building more handy tools is what will differentiate OpenSolaris from Linux and the rest. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: [email protected] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Brian Smith <[email protected]> To: Bart Smaalders <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 5:49:48 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] [indiana-discuss] why gnu chmod in os2008.11? Bart Smaalders wrote: > There are lots of proposals for someone else to do work, but few > volunteers stepping up to the plate. I'm suggesting that those who > argue in favor of extensive changes to the existing Solaris commands > can demonstrate their commitment and interest by helping out. It's not > like we have a large team here at Sun tasked w/ this (or many other) > projects. I agree. But, the project leaders need to let potential contributors know what the strategy is first. Is the goal to make the default userland a 100% superset of GNU tar and Solaris tar or is something less than 100% compatibility with one of them OK? Is GNU compatibility more important than SUSv3 compliance or is SUSv3 compliance a higher priority? What are the goals for making OpenSolaris compatible with previous Solaris versions? Should we let users plod along with sudo/top/tar or should the OS guide them towards pfexec/prstat/star? I think there are some external people like me that are very interested in being OpenSolaris contributors, but who don't understand the strategy and design goals for the project. I don't even know who to ask what the strategy/design goals are. It is obvious that not everybody @sun.com agrees on this userland issue but who has the final say? Regards, Brian _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected] _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
