On 6/26/07, Alberto Ruiz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If we are seriously thinking about making solaris more appealing to linux (and any) users, we should seriosly rethink the way we name packages. For me, any of those package names means absolutely nothing (I know SUNW because I like stock market issues, but I think this SUNW thing is also redundant and meaningless for most people).
+1 On 6/27/07, Alvaro Lopez Ortega <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It's true that the SUNW isn't really meaningful, and that usually package names are quite cryptic. However, it is very important to remain compatible with all the Solaris software out there. And of course, ISVs wouldn't be happy if we change all the package names over night. Besides, with a decent installation utility, you wouldn't even need to know the name of the package. It can use the standard names internally, but that doesn't mean that you'd have to deal with them.
I don't think that is much of a solution, and the current packages ARE one of the things that need to be swept away for Indiana to be acceptable to Linux users like me - that's a hack and not something that should be used in a new distribution. Seperating package names and package file names is a ghastly solution to the problem, if I want to manually download a package called nvidia-drivers, I should be downloading a file called nvidia-drivers.***, not NVDAgraphics.***. I'm getting worried as I was hoping that from the first posts on this list that Indiana could take advantage of the mistakes and lessons learnt from Linux in the past 10 years, but it looks like it is going to be seriously hamstrung by compatibility to Solaris. What I'd love is GNU userland on the Solaris kernel, though I can understand why that is a pointless exercise for Sun as there would be few reasons to "upgrade" from that to Solaris:) But it looks at the moment that OpenSolaris is simply going to be a repackaging of Solaris Express with a new package manager - does anyone seriously believe that's what the world wants? Yeah it will make a bunch of existing Solaris Admins happy, they will have the OS they already use with an update mechanism that isn't gimped unless you pay for a contract, but how many new people is it going to attract? I've just spent 3 weeks using Solaris Express for the first time (and hated every minute of it) and if opensolaris is just that with a package manager and ZFS boot I really doubt I'll be using it (it would be easier to use ZFS with FreeBSD) - some effort needs to go into looking into _why_ using Solaris is such a turn off to people used to modern Linux distributions rather than arguing about what WM should be bundled or what the distribution should be called... _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
