On Thu, 17 May 2007 10:06:50 -0400, you wrote: >On 5/17/07, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Ian Murdock writes: >> > (And, once again, I'm not sure I see anything here that isn't fixed >> > with a "Solaris classic" environment.) >> >> Do we force future project teams to test in both environments? > >I don't see why. If both environments are present, can't the application >pick which one it wants to use? Classic is the default, so that existing >apps don't break (the driving reason not to change things according to this
One of the advantages Solaris has over Linux is that it is a consistent environment. This means any developer (whether a company or an individual) knows with confidence what their application can expect in terms of a runtime environment. Contrast this to Linux, where each distribution does things differently, and so the developers choose 1 distribution to support and everyone else is out of luck because the cost of officially supporting multiple distributions is too expensive. If Sun wants to attract new developers and new applications to the Solaris platform then making things more complicated by increasing the environments to be tested against would seem to be the wrong approach. Which isn't to say that Solaris shouldn't change, because sometimes change is necessary. Just as too much change is bad, never changing can also be bad. As was suggested in another message evaluate what changes might be desirable to make Solaris more attractive to developers and users, decide what needs to be done to achieve those changes, and then with each idea decide if the benefits of change outweigh the cost. >Yes, I'm no doubt oversimplifying, but this doesn't seem like an >intractable problem. The only incremental burden is testing the >interactive environments, i.e., the additional burden scales >linearly, no exponential complexity blowup. And by definition, >the classic environment doesn't change, so there's >really very little additional testing to be done there. Right? Except of course that you have to continue testing the "classic" environment to make sure that nothing has changed. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
