Well, it's been a month or two since the last time I brought this up, but I've seen no progress being made or even further discussion concerning the issues I raised originally. Is it possible we could get a status report, as I'm hopeful Sun *is* working on this.
Basically, I've sent in mails from time to time to this list, inquiring about software management, and what a terrible shame it's so... yuck .... right now. Every time, I've been told it's a known issue and is being addressed. This isn't something that's only affecting me, it's turning off huge amounts of people to running Solaris, because the user-land has a learning curve the size of mount everest, and once you learn it, you wonder why on earth a lot is done how it's done. Then you hit the out-of-date software, we're talking longggg out of date. Stable doesn't have to mean older than dinosaur droppings. A post on OSNews prompted this most recent inquiry, about Ubuntu now being available for Sparc. I'll just paste the post here, and let that act as my mail inquiring about the status of things, and what Sun's intentions are. This is absolutely an OSOL related issue, I use the name Solaris, but as OSOL is the basis for what Solaris becomes, insert OSOL where you see that name if it makes you feel happier. ;) PS - Don't take this as insulting, I mean no disrespect and I know a lot of people put a lot of hard work into this project. It's just an important point that's turning away users, and at least externally, I haven't seen any visible changes - I just want to know what's going on, sort of a status report. :) >From the post, in response to a story about Ubuntu on Sparc: "It's really cool to see this done. Great work, and best wishes to everyone involved. Now, that out of the way, Sun really needs to think long and hard about what it's doing. While some argue which is "better" so to speak, pretty much everybody will admit Solaris is a great server OS. Well, as far as the kernel/technical stuff goes. It's a usability nightmare. Even for a server - sorry - this isn't 1980 - why am I still compiling by hand to have up-to-date software? Ubuntu does pretty much all the things right that Solaris does wrong (nice up-to-date gui, up-to-date software, etc.) I know Sun has this "we don't update so we're sure it's stable standpoint" but Ubuntu really does have some pretty stable software, maybe a bug or two here and there, but overall stable. Fixes for the bugs come out quickly. Like most things, within a month or two of its' release, it'll be rock solid. Not only that, but *reasonably* up to date. I can't say the same thing for Solaris/included software. So, what is Sun going to do? The current model they have isn't going to work. Nobody except masochists, die-hard Sun fans (me), or Sun-based developers would even consider running Solaris on a desktop. I don't, it runs like dog-poo as a desktop on all the systems I've tried it on, AFTER I've had to go edit the hell out of config files because it didn't setup PATH, hosts don't get entered properly, etc. I won't even get into the mess that is installing software newer than 5 years old. Now, I run Solaris on my servers. Guess what though, #1 - I have to keep a few FreeBSD boxes around, because I can't maintain a whole bunch of software via hand compiling it/keeping up with security updates. I keep trying to get rid of them, so I can only maintain one platform, but it's not going to happen. Blastwave doesn't do it for me, simply because if Dennis and the other hardworking people involved someday decide to do something else, I'll be stuck in a software back alley. I want something supported by Sun, that's why people pay for support contracts (Sun's supposed new bread-and-butter.) Sun needs to figure out what it's doing. I'm gonna hit the OSOL lists with this too, but like most things, we'll probably see a bunch of "yes that's great yes we're working on it" type posts, but then observe no changes for the next 6 months. Something needs to be done now, while Sun has a *little* momentum, and something drastic needs to be done. The old software model isn't working, somebody with the power to make decisions in Sun needs to finally come to realize this. Solaris the kernel is rocking, Solaris the user-land stinks. Hurry up and join 2006 with the rest of us..." _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
