On 9/22/2010 6:00 AM, Cedric Blancher wrote:
On 22 September 2010 14:43, Michael Kerpan<mjker...@kerpan.com> wrote:
Frankly, I don't see why none of the forks/sporks/distros floating
around are looking at the modernized, more-featureful versions of the
System V tools available from the Heirloom Tools project. IIRC, most
of them are even CDDL-licensed (as OpenSolaris code was a starting
point for most of them) so they should fit right in with the rest of
the code. If I had the time and energy to do so, I'd go ahead and make
such a distro myself, but I don't, so I guess I'm left wondering why
everyone is looking only at the options of either moving to a BSD or
GNU userland, rather than the superior options of using what is
essentially an enhanced version of what already exists.
Opensolaris was essentially following the IMO superior option of
picking up the ATT AST utilities., the same upstream where ksh93 comes
from.
They are based on the System V utilities but evolved independently of
Solaris, picked up almost all useful features from GNU and BSD along
the way and are developed and tested actively on many platforms,
including compatibility testing on Solaris.
A lot of the utilities are available as libcmd built ins in ksh93,
giving them a major advantage in terms of resource savings and
performance.
I do not understand why Illumos is discontinuing the cooperation with ATT AST.
Ced
I don't think there's any active bias against the AT&T AST stuff -
rather, it's a matter of what the contributors are familiar with.
Thanks for pointing this out.
One of the issues with the Heirloom tools is that some of the Solaris
tools that need to be replaced are significantly different by now, so
it's simpler to port the *BSD tool. All this boils down to
least-amount-of-effort required - take the codebase that fits the need
(standards compliance + feature set) most closely AND which can be fixed
most easily to add the missing stuff.
About the only reason I can see to possibly hurt the AT&T util usage is
that it's under Yet Another License (the CPL), which looks like a cousin
of the MPL/CDDL, but IANAL, and I know one of the things that IllumOS is
trying hard to do is avoid license proliferation. If it turns out the
CPL can be covered by the CDDL, it's golden (and, at first pass, it does
look that way). The jist of the thing is that it makes it much simpler
for users (i.e. the distro builders) of IllumOS to comply with license
terms if all licenses are CDDL-compatible (that is, if they comply with
the CDDL, they're sure to be complying with whatever other license the
code bits have).
Oh, and we should probably move this discussion off the OpenSolaris
lists, and onto the IllumOS ones.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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