One item that's been discussed in various arenas is bumping the uname output for the OS version (SunOS) from 5.x to 6.0 in OpenSolaris/Solaris.Next, to reflect the major changes occuring, especially the completely different packaging/installation system.
Unfortunately, a lot of configure scripts for open source packages are written to check the uname output and make decisions based on it, either through direct `uname -rs` type calls or via the GNU autoconf macros such as AC_CANONICAL_HOST that map SunOS 5.x to *-*-solaris2.x. When you're working with importing open source packages and contributing patches back to their communities, you may want to check and see what happens to their builds if you build with uname set to SunOS 6.0 - if you have root, you can easily change the uname for a shell with the script at http://blogs.sun.com/angelo/entry/dtrace_detective_the_sequel For instance, I ran this with "pfexec ./uname.d $$" in a shell and then ran the latest version of the config.guess script from savannah.gnu.org and saw it doesn't know what to do with a uname greater than 5.x yet, reporting: ./config.guess: unable to guess system type This script, last modified 2009-02-03, has failed to recognize the operating system you are using. So clearly we'll have to work with the GNU autotools upstream before many projects can be uname-6-safe, but others may be able to be made clean without GNU autotool changes and anything you can do to prepare now will help reduce the pain for all later. -- -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
