Glenn Lagasse wrote:
> AI is different, intentionally so. Among other things, we're actually
> trying to improve automated installation of OpenSolaris.
Agree that AI, IPS, and lots of things going forward are much better.
Our obstacle in the field is incompatibility with existing practices,
procedures, run books, etc. at our large customer sites. If it's
substantially harder to move to the next Solaris than it is to move to
{RHEL, AIX, whatever else you might choose}, not matter how much better
our improvements might be; they'll be lost. Our customers are at least
as harried and overworked as we are. They generally can't afford a
wholesale retrofit of their installation, provisioning, packaging,
patching, certification, training, documentation just to get to the next
version of an OS (from their point of view).
> Maybe we can't come up with solutions, but until people
> work with us by providing concrete requirements (other than just 'we
> want begin/finish scripts') so that we can actually engineer something
> we'll never know.
>
> My .02.
>
Agree again. Whether it's the case or not, it feels to many in the
field like the request for requirements has not come, has come late in
the process, not been widely broadcast, whatever. Whether it has or has
not, the sender and the receiver have not come together. Probably
plenty of non-productive blame to be had on both sides.
Also agree that many of us in the field have not been specific enough
with our use cases. Though, many of us have also been offering for many
months to facilitate direct meetings with some of our customers to get
*their* requirements / current use scenarios first hand and haven't been
taken up on it.
This is something that has to work, has to meet customers' needs at
least for the most part, right out of the gate, or it will be a huge
hurdle to overcome and will take several of years to get around.
I would hate for us to reprise the Solaris 2.0-2.3 situation, where
after a really large change in the OS, it took 4 releases for us to get
to a place where people really began to deploy it.
Off my soapbox, for now.
--SCott
