OpenSolaris, at least according to David Comay & Co., is going for Linux / GNU crowd directly, hence the forced-at-all-and-any-cost replacement of System V utilities to GNU userland
Actually, that's never been stated as a goal in any form. What has been said is there is a large community of both users and developers out there that the OpenSolaris ecosystem is missing by shipping a set of legacy UNIX tools that both lack features and are unfamiliar. Many of those users are developing software and infrastructure that is being used today and in the future to power websites, databases, storage infrastructure, appliances, you name it using operating systems other than Solaris. A large number of these pieces of software and infrastructure are being built and deployed on GNU/Linux systems. I, for one, would like to see this new wave of software being developed and deployed on OpenSolaris. The goal of modernization or familiarization is to make the system be familiar to those users while retaining the aspects of the traditional Solaris system most important. That means, for example, compatibility at many levels including the DDI, ABI and support for various standards. It also means looking at other implementations, learning from them, perhaps borrowing ideas and yes, maybe using those other implementations if they're actually better implementations. How this is achieved is an open question. I think in many cases the existing command set should be extended to support the features the cause new users to scratch their heads and wonder what era this Solaris system came from. In other cases, it might be wise to throw out the existing implementation and use a different implementation once the analysis has been done around compatibility, performance, feature set, standards compliance, internationalization, etc have been done. The familiarity today is achieved minimally by prepending /usr/gnu/bin to the front of the user's PATH. It's well understood what the limitations are with that approach and I would like to remove that change once the command set under /usr/bin has been enhanced to a sufficient degree that new users coming to the system are able to be productive. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
