Darren J Moffat wrote:
Ian Murdock wrote:
2. With all the negative opinions about Linux around here, I'm surprised
to have to say this, but: Multiple distributions without a reference for
compatibility is *not* a feature of Linux we want to emulate! I know,
I've
spent the better part of the last 5 years trying to clean up the mess,
with mixed results. It's far easier to create an ecosystem of compatible
implementations if you *start* with a reference. All attempts at
building a reference after the fact in Linux have been an abject
failure.
But what is the purpose of such a reference ? To tell other people
they are doing it wrong ? To be the supported platform people point
to when an ISV starts porting their application ?
I don't think saying Linux is in a mess because it doesn't have one is
fair here. OpenSolaris is very different it has Solaris as a legacy,
and it conforms to standards that many Linux distros don't.
So what problem are you trying to solve here ? I just don't get it.
I would see a reference distribution responsible for defining things like:
- CLI for essential utilities
- minimum set of features/bugs in borne shell
- starting and stopping services
- package maintainance
- and so on...maybe even just establishing "ON" as "the reference"
To pick a trivial example of where Lin*x fails, the command line for
enabling a service for run levels 3/4/5 is different on RedHat and SuSe.
Thus it is impossible to ship a single rc script that works for both.
If someone were to take OpenSolaris today and build a distribution
that shipped with a wildly different package or SMF front end, what
value does that add vs the cost to 3rd parties to "deal with" ?
A reference needs to be established so that 3rd parties and
systems folks have a common core set of interfaces that they
can expect to interact with for basic system tasks.
Darren
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