(I don't know why this is on Illumos Dev list since it's more suited for the discuss list - posting to both. Please respond on the discuss list ONLY)
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but SVR4 and SPARC are both dead. It's as simple as that. Get over it and stop bothering the rest of us. SPARC is a technology owned by Oracle. The only SPARC boxes you can buy on eBay are relics, and I'd wager my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone with it's dual core 1GHz ARM chip can outperform all of them. Power is now incredibly expensive, and the economics of running old equipment make no sense what so ever. If you buy an old SPARC box on ebay for $500, it's going to cost you more than that per year to run it. You're far better off buying a high density modern intel box and then use virtualisation to consolidate workloads. You just cannot beat the economics. There is just no viable reason for using SPARC, except perhaps to run legacy software where no binaries exist for x86. Since future SPARC development is now under the stewardship of Oracle, it's now a proprietary legacy CPU architecture. If you buy a new SPARC box, you're giving your money to Oracle and at that point you may as well run Solaris 10 or 11 on it. The illumos developers have commercial interests wedded on x86, and since the project has no access to modern SPARC equipment like M3000s or T4s, nor access to the technical specs, there's no real reason for the illumos developers to expend valuable time and energy on developing for SPARC. So at this point, as far as I'm concerned the people who want SPARC are hobbyists interested in running old equipment, much like how I like to get out my Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, or they're lunatics with no grip on reality. Secondly, SVR4 is yet another dead end technology. SVR4 packaging was crap back when it was widely in use, and it's still crap now. OpenIndiana and OmniOS use IPS, Nexenta/Illumian use deb, and SmartOS dispensed with packaging entirely. If you have SVR4 packages, rinse them through pkgsend which will publish them to an IPS repo and problem solved. When people talk to me about SVR4, I imagine things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SunOS_4.1.1_P1270750.jpg Sure, there are people out there with fetishes for cassette tapes and vinyl records, but they, like the SVR4 fetishists, are in the minority. The majority of people just want to get work done, and IPS lets you get more work done faster. If you're pining for SVR4, put your money where your mouth is and fork. I can guarantee you that the unwashed masses will give your 80s throwback distro a wide berth. As project lead I can tell you that we won't be doing SPARC unless someone comes along and takes ownership of that project, and we definitely won't ever be doing SVR4 packaging as long as I'm project lead. ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
