> What is the strategy to "fix the utilities"? Will the GNU utilities be > modified to be supersets of their Solaris counterparts? What is the strategy > for the cases where the default behavior is different between the Solaris > version and the GNU version (and/or when the GNU version is non-POSIX by > default, by design) like "tar" and "make"?
As has been stated before, there are several ways of moving forward. In some cases, the GNU utility may serve as a suitable replacement or base for this work. In other cases, it might be the existing Solaris version. Or perhaps something else such as the Schily version or a BSD version. Several people have been doing an evaluation of the so-called conflicting commands and I hope we can make that evaluation available shortly. What I expect is we'll spin up a new project within a relevant community (likely ON) to deal with the work in this area. > What is the plan for the default path in Solaris 11? Will it be like Solaris > 10 or OpenSolaris? Because, I think there are a lot of OpenSolaris users > like me who would like to see as much compatibility between OpenSolaris and > whatever ends up in Solaris 11, as much as possible. In particular, the > defaults for OpenSolaris and Solaris 11 should be the same, at the very > least (and, AFAICT, that means they have to be the same as in Solaris 10, if > I understand the compatibility guarantee). I think that's still to be determined. But to be perfectly honest, I expect the next enterprise release of Solaris (I don't know frankly what it will be called or when it will be released) will be substantially different from the normal evolution path of traditional Solaris releases. That doesn't mean the whole world is going to change or that compatibility doesn't matter but there will be major changes. Obviously, you've seen some of that in the Caiman installer and the Image Packaging System. There are likely to also be some legacy frameworks that will be EOFed before that enterprise release comes out. >From my point of view, we want to maintain compatibility whenever possible but realistically, strict, 100% compatibility on every front won't be there. In some cases, there may be transition tools for certain areas of the system. In other cases, some sort of virtualization may be used to run applications or stacks. Obviously, participation of the community in helping us figure the way forward is most welcome. Input in the form of requirements and feedback is of course desired but even more so, the willingness to roll up ones sleeves and deal with the thorny issues is particularly appreciated. But please understand, a number of us believe there are some fundamental changes that need to be made in order to make OpenSolaris desirable by a much wider audience. It isn't making OpenSolaris more like Linux but it is making OpenSolaris more familiar to an audience which so far, has resisted the benefits that features like ZFS, DTrace, SMF, etc can bring to their own computing requirements. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
