Comments on: Solaris, Linux, it is GNU folks…

By: MacPlusG3

MacPlusG3 — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:21:13 +0000

Sheeri, for the record – I totally agree about all the install places.

By: MacPlusG3

MacPlusG3 — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:20:22 +0000

I disagree with no market for Indiana – it’s certainly the only way I’d ever consider really trying out some of the Solaris features. Otherwise it’s simply a lot of effort – which can be better spent improving other areas of your own product.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:00:19 +0000

I really dont understand the Indiana thing, Linux users will not use it.
If they wanted they would gone to *BSD a long time ago.
Solaris users will not use it. The want the crap called Solaris.

There are no market and no users. Murdoch will soon move along…

By: Sheeri

Sheeri — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:28:10 +0000

Nothing alienates your users by putting all the good tools into addons instead of into the default install, and then making all those addons *and* any tools that were part of the default install into a place that isn’t even assigned to people’s PATHs.

I was a Solaris admin in a previous life; that really sucked. I should be able to use stuff out of the box; good tools should be installed by default AND should be put into the PATH. We had a good jumpstart/cfengine setup, so I didn’t have to do this manually, but basically the first thing we’d do is change the user paths and the default user paths.

(btw, as a complaint to MySQL…../opt/mysql vs /usr/local/mysql vs /var/lib/mysql . . . . . can’t we just have *one* default intall location, please?)

By: MacPlusG3

MacPlusG3 — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:39:09 +0000

AIX fits in the dead but doesn’t know it category :)

Sure it’s already in a bunch of places – but can anybody give a single good reason to start a new deployment with it?

By: James McPherson

James McPherson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:11:19 +0000

If you’re doing a full install of OpenSolaris then you should be able to find gmake in /usr/sfw/bin/gmake – part of the SUNWgmake package. There are a lot of GNU tools in there (/usr/sfw), but there are also more and more GNU tools in /usr/bin – but where there’s a name conflict with an existing Solaris tool, the GNU version will most likely be in /usr/gnu instead.

btw for others reading these comments: http://au.sun.com/sunnews/events/2008/techdays/ is the Sun Tech Days link for Sydney.

By: noisymime

noisymime — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:35:53 +0000

I’m sure it fitted into your “dead but doesn’t know it yet category”, but I can promise that AIX is both still closed source and alive and well. Its embedded so deeply in many places that I can’t see it going anywhere fast.
Whilst IBM is pushing Linux in many places, there’s certain areas that are still off limits for it in Big Blue’s eyes.

By: MacPlusG3

MacPlusG3 — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:16:23 +0000

James – thanks for pointing out the Tech Days event… I’m looking at it now (didn’t originally plan to be there… but could be a good idea… I’ll see how I go and let you know)

By: MacPlusG3

MacPlusG3 — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:08:11 +0000

Of course… simple instructions on going from stock Solaris to “./configure; make” for mysql is much appreciated :)

The thing is of course, it should be a trivial thing to do (see above on Ubuntu).

By: MacPlusG3

MacPlusG3 — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:05:20 +0000

Not alienating the user-base is a good thing I agree.

if [ -f ~/.solaris_gnu_userspace ]; then
# FOO
endf

would do a lot. Then you can have a ~/.solaris_gnu_userspace in /etc/skel (or not) – and providing a quick bit of info in /etc/motd would be *HUGE*

The LSB File System Hierarchy standard gives us a number of nice things, including where binaries are found. There’s even clean migration: symlinks!

/usr/ccs
/usr/sfw
/usr/perl5
/usr/ccs/bin/amd64/
/opt/SUNWspro/

ARGH!

FreeBSD ends up being a lot nicer and easier to move to… things are rather similar… you have /usr/local with lots of stuff in it, but otherwise things are very simple.

IRIX ended up being quite weird… /usr can only be described as messy…. but at least there was a tendency to use words rather than abbreviations (/usr/OpenOffice is one that comes to mind).. so just working it out isn’t *too* painful.

(of course, HPUX and AIX sholud just go away… but that’s another story)