On 16/09/2007, Tim Bray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sep 16, 2007, at 10:42 AM, Shawn Walker wrote: > > > Not any more than it does now. The people that created this problem > > are the idiots that put #!/bin/sh at the top of their script and > > assume that means bash, when it obviously isn't. > > Well, "obviously" it is on a few distros whose adoption dwarfs that > of Solaris. There are lots of people who've spent years living in an > environment where this is true. Branding them as idiots is, um, > unhelpful to promoting the adoption of Solaris.
*playing devil's advocate* ...by that reasoning, Windows dwarfs all by comparison, so we should set our targets to be compatible with Windows and not with GNU/Linux. ** Unehlpful, but true. The irony here is that when their world started, they complained all the time about all the work they had to do to port true POSIX software to their not-truly-but-almost-POSIX system. Now the shoe's on the other foot... > Seems like there's two choices. Make bash the default for new user > accounts, and also /bin/sh, and a huge proportion of script-ware and > learned behavior for people coming over from those other distros will > Just Work. Or, put in something else and you get to have an > enjoyable conversation with all those people about why it's OK that > the stuff that they're used to doesn't work any more because, you > see, this other shell is better than what they're used to. Except > for, with a high proportion you won't, because they'll say "WTF? My > shell scripts don't work? I'm outta here." The problem with this view is that it leaves no room for improvement. If we do what we've always done, we'll get what we've always gotten. Changing the shell to something other than what it is, is something different. Personally, I think that doing things the same way "GNU/Linux does them," for no other reason than that, is a road to failure. If all we're going to do is copy GNU/Linux, then what's the point all of this work? The GNU world breaks things all the time, in the name of making things better. As an example, the transition to gcc4 left many people without code that wouldn't compile. What was the solution? People had to fix their code. > There are some areas where Solaris is *clearly* better. I'd like > Indiana's pitch to be "Your knowledge still applies. Your existing > stuff works. Except for, here are some good things you couldn't do > before." -Tim But that will never be 100% true. If they want to run GNU/Linux stuff, that's what BrandZ zones are for. I don't understand your campaign to make Solaris just like GNU/Linux. There will never be a complete translation of GNU/Linux knowledge to a Solaris platform. The day there is, what's the point of using Solaris when I could just use Linux? Don't go off on the whole "we have ZFS, etc." because the only reason that's true is due to licensing... -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
