Henry B. Hotz wrote: > As I have said before, I do not know enough about SMF to have a > technical opinion. However from a marketing and customer confidence > standpoint it is clearly a disaster.
How is it so clearly a disaster? I give quite a few SMF demos, bootcamps, TOI, whatever, and reactions are generally positive, even back as far as 2 years ago. Here are the things which elicit the most groans, not in any order 1) XML 2) weirdness between running snapshot and recent changes to the service 3) wordy alien syntax to put stuff into repository with svccfg The decision to use XML was, as I understand it, partly due to a free library and parser; and XML lends itself to a simple construction of a GUI later on. Any one who's done a home improvement project could relate to this, perhaps. That ceiling hook for the grand chandelier might just be a hook for a few years. (2) confuses people and both (2) and (3) are obstacles to users feeling more comfortable with SMF. But even the revelation that what's in the XML might not represent the running state doesn't elicit that much objection and protest. > The intensity of opinions on this thread raise the question of whether > the "official channels" are appropriate. Marketing and customer > relations issues should be dealt with by the appropriate management, > not a technical development process. It would appear that someone > inside Sun should forward this thread to the appropriate management. When I first saw SMF, I thought, Oh no, it's son of NIS+, people will be wanting their rc scripts back in a year. I'm not sure if I like SMF because it's intrisically good, or that I'm familiar enough with the tool now to use it easily. Typical admins don't spend their time writing or debugging manifest or trying to put configurable values into the repository. I disagree with whoever said that there's lots of docs for SMF. There's practically NONE, outside the man pages. The only other major S10 feature that gets even less docs is probably FMA. But FMA is so unobtrusive and one doesn't really interact with FMA unless there's a problem. SMF didn't conquer the world like ZFS and DTrace, but it's not disliked so much that it's a disaster from the customer's point of view. CT
