On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 12:26 AM, <johansen at sun.com> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 04:08:09PM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote: >> I'd rather see us modernize our own tools. I resent abdication of >> our own engineering, and the necessity of abandoning all good >> innovations (like shell builtins) because some people feel its >> critical that the only way to achieve these goals is to provide >> these 3rd party tools. Its more offensive to me specifically >> because there is no good reason why we can't use tools from the >> ksh93 community (who seems to be a lot more willing to work with us >> on key engineering issues than the GNU folks who are mostly fixated >> on Linux) to achieve this. > > Instead of re-inventing the wheel at every opportunity, it makes more > sense to take the open source projects that have wide acceptance and > incorporate them into our product. I think that both ksh93 and gnu fall > into this category. It's much better for us to focus our engineering > efforts on areas where we can actually differentiate our product from > our competitors. > > I don't have a problem with ksh93 or the builtins, nor am I advocating > an entirely GNU userland. What I am suggesting, however, is that the > folks who decided to put /usr/gnu in the default path did talk to our > customers,
Yes, they did. But they ignored our counsel. Adopting GNU coreutils as default or replacements for /usr/bin is not the answer (and never was). Sun needs a community centric progressive development and adopt POSIX, BSD and GNU features and semantics and not drop in GNU coreutils in the current swallow&die manner. > and also took note of the fact that Linux is widely adoped > across the industry. BSD is widely adopted in the industry, too. Many servers run FreeBSD and many embedded machines run NetBSD. Why was /usr/bsd/bin not adopted instead of /usr/gnu/bin? Sun's management seems to have a obsession with Linux, doesn't bother to look at alternatives and abandoned its own development of the userland utilities (there won't be a UNIX certification for Opensolaris) and now even starts to beat the community which has developed an alternative solution. The real strength of Linux is its community, the *OPEN* development process (not the behind-the-closed-curtain ARC process, i.e. 2010/067) and cooperation. Sun's management still has to learn that. Or Opensolaris will FAIL. >> I'm also of the opinion that it is a mistake to sacrifice >> familiarity for our paying Solaris 10 customers in favor of >> familiarity for people coming from Linux. > > This is a false dilemma. It should be entirely possible for customers > to configure whatever default path they desire and deploy that in their > enterprise via AI. Possible. Yes. Yet it's the *default* configuration we're discussing here. A *default* which broke too many things on my companies side. Guess why we did not port our applications from Solaris 10 to Opensolaris yet? The costs are too high. >> Which group do you think contributes more towards the $$ that pay our >> salaries? > > I would love to argue this point with you, but it's not appropriate to > discuss it on a public mailing list. What is cheaper for Sun? Put /usr/gnu/bin in front of PATH and break almost all user scripts or progressively enhance the utilities in /usr/bin to adopt BSD and GNU features with POSIX as foundation. The latter sounds like the better (and cheaper!) alternative as Opensolaris has already the POSIX community for that purpose. Irek
