Shawn Walker wrote:

>you should realise that many open source projects develop software that often 
>only correctly (or easily) compiles on GNU-based operating systems.

I'm confused. What then is the point of all those GNU packages in OpenSolaris? 
It is in order to port software from GNU/Linux to Solaris, as far as I 
understand. Is there some technical reason why a program written for the gcc 
compiler and which uses GNU libraries must in principle be more difficult to 
compile under OpenSolaris than under a Linux distribution such as Fedora or 
OpenSUSE? Solaris has its own native tools and libraries, in their own 
directories, so nothing that is done to GNU packages can break native Solaris 
applications.

Shouldn't the ideal be that any application that complies under GNU/Linux will 
compile under OpenSolaris? And isn't realizing that ideal simply a matter of 
putting enough work into the porting of GNU tools and libraries to Solaris? Or 
am I missing something?

Anything you can say to dispel my confusion, or any links to documents 
addressing this issue, would be very much appreciated.

(I understand that if code gets sufficiently close to machine level, then the 
code must be modified to work on a different OS. (For example, I've ported SBCL 
(Steel Bank Common Lisp) from x86 Solaris to AMD64 Solaris.) But with something 
like VLC, if it only uses x.org interfaces as opposed to trying to access the 
hardware directly, if one knows it compiles under Fedora for example, shouldn't 
it be as easy to compile under OpenSolaris as under OpenSUSE, for example?)
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