On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 6:51 AM, Alan DuBoff <al...@softorchestra.com> wrote: >> The comment about GNU is IMO unjustified. The ksh93-integration and >> AT&T team have done a much better technical job than GNU in the last >> four years. We got ksh93, a lot of modernized tools, even more in the >> work, with GNU *and* BSD extensions, stick to POSIX and a stable API >> and they are evolving with the rest of the open source world. > > That all sounds good, but I have long used GNU extensions on Solaris, "gtar" > as a case in point so that I could get compression support with tar.
You picked a bad example. GNU tar has its own share of problems. By default no other achiever than GNU tar can unpack long path names in archives created by GNU tar. That's a big problem. It becomes worse because tar archives with long path names created with GNU tar from 2002 can't be read back by GNU tar from 2010. That's a huge problem. Of course it can be solved by using the old GNU tar, star from schilly or AT&T AST pax. But it shows how little the GNU community invests in stable interfaces and interoperability. I have more examples, at least one for each GNU tool I know. > gupdatedb/glocate are another example. There are many Sun/Solaris folks that > will be quick to tell you how crappy the GNU extensions are, but there are > more than a few like me that would just like to have some of the features > they offer. The bigger problem is in having both code bases. In Nexenta's > case they don't maintain much of that, they use the GNU base and Debian folks > maintain that for them. Maintain may be the wrong word. The quality is substandard (at best). Look at the source code, but only if you have a healthy heart. Look at the package configurations, either compile without optimizer or use -O5000 to ensure gcc bugs really break the application. Look at the discussions where the maintainers spend more time discussing licenses than fixing bugs. Look at their obsession with x86, many of the SPARC packages are in a state of disrepair. Look at GNU tools on SPARC - many of them work poorly - even the latest coreutils package gives you SIGBUS because the basic SPARC rule of natural data type alignment is ignored. These things have been improved in the last years with the rise of tools like valgrind and new major platforms like ARM. But it's still a long way to go. > However, not to digress, my point was more in relation to leveraging open > source to solve the same problems they were designed for. To be able to work > with the other open source communities so that all can grow as a whole. +1 But Oracle (includes ex-Sun) still has to learn to cooperate and interact with the/a community. Unfortunately I really have doubt if they are willing do to just that because they are not able to maintain a stable and equal partnership, even with established communities and even after FOUR years. http://www.mail-archive.com/ksh93-integration-disc...@opensolaris.org/msg00208.html is the hallmark of this behavior - Oracle just picks the parts which fits into their view of the world and the community is locked out if they do not agree. Of course the community followed ALL of Oracle's rules like filing PSARC cases and code review. Not enough for Oracle. IMO an equal and trustworthy partnership looks different. A lot different. > This is the "Not Invented Here" syndrome. Right. It's known as "Not Invented At Sun" syndrome. I remember the heated PSARC discussions when ksh93 was added and all the bricks Sun put in the way of the team. It's incredibly now much bullshit the team had to endure just because Sun really wanted to show off all their fancy cool rules at once. I think this drove off many people interested in contributing. > I used Nexenta as an example only because they were able to put together a > distribution that did leverage the GNU base. But they not only had a > distribution together but had ZFS included on the root file system long > before (Open)Solaris. > > More so I believe that John Plocher's point was spot on, because I was always > 100% supportive of the fact that the <cough> (Open)Solaris community should > be built out of 100% open code, so the community doesn't have to rely on > Oracle, and more importantly so that they CAN build it. Without the closed > bins I don't think the kernel will build anymore. There is a LOT of code in > closed, and all the HBA controllers have support by means of closed bins as I > recall... Why aren't be going to put money together and HIRE someone. 100 people pay $100 each month to hire 2-3 people to eradicate the closed sources in libc. A company could pay $1000 a month and only 90 people have to pay to $100. Two companies could pay $2000 and only 80 people have to pay the $100.... > WTF, we can't even use the <cough> (Open)Solaris name. Why don't we rename the organisation then? OGB should hold a contest and community vote and then move all servers to the new name. This should be easy. Oracle of course will not be happy but it's their fault. >> Just looking at Debian, Ubuntu and Linux only doesn't make Opensolaris >> better, it gives only a shadow or at best a petty clone but not a top >> grade enterprise system. > > I think Linux is good enough for the enterprise. If I have to sacrifice the > ability to build the system from open sources, enterprise doesn't mean $#!T > at the end of the day. Live free or die... +1 Josh _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
