Wed, 24 Jan 2007
Ian Murdock on Solaris...
If you want another example, one from a company who any developer would agree is an outstanding engineering organization, here's one: "Sun has maintained binary compatibility between operating system releases for nearly a decade, enabling existing Solaris applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10. This means that Solaris applications developed 10 years ago will run on Solaris 10 unchanged, taking full advantage of new and advanced Solaris features."
Yes, it's true that there is outstanding backward binary compatibility in Solaris. However, if you're going to try use that as an argument in favour of Solaris, try again.
Have you ever actually used a Solaris system?
- The ugliness on a Solaris system starts with $PATH, which is all over the place: /usr/ucb/bin for the compiler, /usr/gnu/bin (IIRC) for bash, /usr/bin for sed. The FHS is nonexistent.
- Everyone who writes code for the Berkeley socket API knows that
Solaris has to be different:
#ifndef sun int yes=1; #else char yes='1'; #endif
- Even if you do it that way, on Solaris you have to say -lsocket.
- I've heard claims that Solaris, partially because of the backward compatibility, is rather slow; that Linux beats the shit out of Solaris on the hardware (SPARC) that was more or less specifically designed for Solaris (and vice versa). Having used it for a short while once, I cannot think of a counterargument for that one.
If you're going to say that backwards compatibility is good and that we should incorporate backwards compatibility into Linux somehow, then please do not point people towards the two ugliest operating systems on the earth with a lot of garbage baggage for the sake of backwards compatibility...
Software? If you are still running some buggy database server from 1995, you are probably running it on the solaris install from 1995.
Device drivers? I guess some people don't mind trusting their important data to old versions of binary only drivers...
I think a lot of people that like solaris are not even unix USERS. They install solaris, someone else comes along and installs some old program in /opt, and then they never touch the system again. For them, it's great if they can upgrade the system and not have anything break. These are the kind of people who are still running systems with netscape 4, and an emacs version from 1999.
it sounds like you used a rather badly managed solaris machine.
it doesn't *have* to be that painful... but for some folks, it is.
[disclosure - I maintain a bunch of solaris boxes in addition to our debian boxen. things learned on one transition fairly easily to the other, to be honest.]
--elijah
While it doesn't adhere to the FHS (which I consider broken in many ways anyway), Solaris is consistent with itself, and has been since the beginning of time. Of course there are ugly hacks in it, but they are documented.
Once you have your .cshrc (or .brokenshellrc) set up, you don't notice you're on Solaris or Linux or BSD half the time.
What *does* annoy me about Solaris is that they put stub shell scripts in /usr/ucb when the BSD tools aren't there. It would make scripts easier if one could just rely on getting ENOENT if something is missing.
- Philip
- Bryan
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Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Performance. bmc@eng.sun.com (415) 786-3652