On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 08:23:59PM -0400, brian.gupta at gmail.com wrote: > I would bet that a majority of SAs from all the other NIXES all use top.
I'm sure they do, since they don't have anything better. > I vote to put it in unless it has a namespace collision. If this is the path we're going to start down, I'd like to understand the criteria we're going to use in deciding that the comfort of immigrants trumps coherence of strategy. For example, if we learned that immigrants from GNU/Linux "just want SystemTap" would we integrate it despite already having a superior tool in DTrace? It seems worth spending some time now to understand how we will choose between helping immigrants find and learn the OpenSolaris Way of achieving their goals and giving them the familiar, but often inferior and certainly less well-integrated, tools. It would also be worth understanding whether we'd like to learn why people prefer other tools (when they have reasons other than finger memory) and improve our own. That is, if we recognise a certain set of circumstances in which we'd prefer to integrate third-party tools rather than enhance our own, is that a set of circumstances in which we should also remove our existing tools (since we presumably have no interest in improving them to meet people's needs)? This, I think, is really the core of my fear for OpenSolaris's future: what value are we providing if instead of learning what people want from their tools and then providing solutions in a well-integrated and architectually sane way, we simply integrate a set of tools we believe are familiar to users of other operating systems? I simply don't believe a sufficient reason has been offered for integrating top (all of the things people have mentioned liking about top could easily be implemented in prstat, either by default or as a compatibility mode), if one posits that a desire to have a tool simply because it's the de facto standard on other systems is sufficient reason to overlook architectural consistency and completeness of integration, I don't see any effort to establish a clear limit to the applicability of that desire. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
