[nylug-talk] Is there any overlap in the NYC Linux community with Solaris?

[H. G.]

On 5/16/07, Peter C. Norton <spacey-nylug at lenin.net> wrote:
>
> Something between C and D for me. I stir the pot on
> opensolaris-discuss when I can. With the advent of dtrace, there's no
> excuse for sun to not be developing tools to quantify things such as
> what is outmoded - eg. does anything actually rely on all of solaris
> userland defaulting to 512 byte blocks?  Why does everyone have to
> figure out that /usr/xpg4/ is where the actual not-broken tools are?
> Why does the solaris "community" think people will want to adopt
> solaris as their serious platform when every new user has to find out
> that the people that maintain it don't want new users to be able to
> use any working unix tools without conditionally modifying their paths
> based on decades of arcana that point them towards /usr/xpg4,
> /usr/ccs/bin, /usr/sfw/bin/, and/or /usr/ucb?
>
> AAARRRGH!
>
> People there who spent too much time looking at CDE think that it's
> both usable and useful. That the anti-user functionality of the dtterm
> is what people really want (nice to have a terminal type that's not
> well-supported by the OS's own termcap, let alone any other
> platforms!).  That crap has got to change.



Chiming in here, I _completely_ agree.
I like Solaris, and they've done some especially impressive work as of late.
But there are issues.

One of Solaris' biggest failings in my opinion is the lack of official
package management and repository facilities.

In just about all Linuxen, and most BSDs, installing and managing
your installed software is pretty easy.  Debian's apt & dpkg, Gentoo's
Portage, ArchLinux's pacman, FreeBSD's pkg_* and ports, its pretty damn
easy everywhere........... except Solaris.  One of _THE_ biggest failings in
my humble opinion for new initiates from other *nix based OSes.  (And
its supposed to be "enterprise".)  You have to rely on 3rd party sources
such as Blastwave.  What is the story with that?

Before even looking at things such as desktop environments and GUI
enhancements,
efforts need to be made to improve the userland.  Peter mentioned some of
the issues
above: all the PATH munging, pointless legacy rules; it hurts the userland
experience.
Also, new initiates run into issues with Solaris' device naming. It isn't
awesome when
you're spending 15 minutes playing Whack-A-Mole trying to *guess* where in
/dev your
device is.