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The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

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Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#271

Post by fulminatorz68 »

sethrin wrote: post #252
feld wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.

Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example of its type ever to have been invented.

I'd suggest your experience|expertise is lacking. My first couple of months were bad but then I learned to appreciate the expressiveness and facility of even a bad shell language and the open horizon of how things were done. This comment seems to be classic troll or sour grapes.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#272

Post by fulminatorz68 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #269
feld wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "find support" ? This is open source software. Your sysadmins are your first line of support. If they can't debug issues, work with the open source community, and write basic patches in C you have the wrong staff.

Well, two things here. First: Really, the requirement for vendor 'support' is something I've always had a bit of a hard time rationalizing.. Getting a vendor in for consultancy/implementation help is a bit of a different story though and is often worth it. Back to support.. The old "Alright, we pay RedHat or Oracle for support for when something breaks" thing.. The reality is when something does go arse over bollocks…

I can write kernel patches. Any good SA >= 10 years with C can. And we don't because it is a symptom we notice and not the problem and we are interested in a fix only as a way to survive till the cure. Kudos to the rest of your post. God bless the elders in this industry.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#273

Post by fusiongyro »

DonHopkins wrote: post #267
raattgift wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for being "discrete" as asked in the last paragraph from 1986. That was a good read. Although less extreme, Solaris multiarch was not exactly always a picnic. From when it started becoming a lot less insane: https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/multiarch-package-support-in...

I'm the one who got in trouble for forwarding that to a mailing list that leaked it to Pyramid, but in my defense, Pete did say: "Tell your friends and loved ones. We are considering calling Pyramid to see if they want in on the action (but we'll only call them after we disable the remote diagnostic port)." Better to ask for forgiveness, after you already assumed you had permission. Maybe Pete was rightfully pissed b…

What was the winning bid? :)

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#274

Post by unexistance »

buserror wrote: post #165
InTheArena wrote: post #65

Solaris, hell, I still mourn the death of SunOS (esp verison 4.1.3) at the hands of Solaris,

Ah... I loved SunOS! Fondly remember my Sun Station 3/80, nothing like that fancy SPARC processor in there, a good solid 68040 like real men used back then ;-) Mind you, I still use the 'sun' font when booting my linux kernel on framebuffers, I always loved that font.

oooh what is this sun font you're talking about? is it available anywhere?

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#275

Post by cryptonector »

snw wrote: post #169

There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is on…

The nostalgia I feel is for Sun, for MPK17, for the people I got to work with, and the technology. Of those things only Sun is gone, but the people scattered, and technology, though still vibrant, is still always at risk -- it depends too much on Bryan Cantrill and friends to keep it going, while the Linux crowd blissfully ignores all the good ideas and reinvents every wheel badly.

We're in a dark ages with a sliver of light. We might be in it for a while. People who have never used ZFS, SMF, DTrace, or FMA, have no idea that they are stuck in the dark.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#276

Post by kjs3 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #208
fusiongyro wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I used it a little in college in the early 2000s, along with anything else I could get my hands on, and it seemed to me to be user hostile even by Unix standards. When I worked with Linux, *BSD etc. or Irix, things tended to make more sense. It was difficult to get much experience with Solaris or the other commercial Unixes because you usually had to have particular hardware. Even when Solaris became free an…

I guess you never had the pleasure of using a Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer running OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli... >Pyramid Technology's OSx Operati…

Ha! We had a 90x at Georgia Tech. Every bit as schitzo as you describe, though I don't really know anyone who more than dipped a toe in the SysV 'Universe'.

I seem to recall it was our CPU that was notorious for crapping out on a regular basis.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#277

Post by kjs3 »

fusiongyro wrote: post #231
qubex wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Solaris is user-hostile, you should really try out IBM's AIX ("Unix by drunk aliens"). I haven't had great experiences with Irix either.

Sure. But AIX is something you are forced to use, not something you opt-in for. All the remaining commercial Unixes are kind of in that boat. People my age and younger just didn't get much access to commercial Unix environments when we were growing up. Once we got into industry, we found it hard to see the justification for high Unixes when we had experienced good results with low Unixes. So the low Unixes have mostl…

AIX is something you are forced to use, not something you opt-in for

That's a great way to look at it. More precisely, AIX is mainframe Unix. It's "now you've graduated, you have to wear a coat and tie, fill out timesheets, do what the boss tells you" Unix. There's little joy in AIX, it's a cold, industrial place where your soul goes to be crushed. In return, it's a workhorse like no other.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#278

Post by sethrin »

fulminatorz68 wrote: post #271
sethrin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example of its type ever to have been invented.

I'd suggest your experience|expertise is lacking. My first couple of months were bad but then I learned to appreciate the expressiveness and facility of even a bad shell language and the open horizon of how things were done. This comment seems to be classic troll or sour grapes.

It was a joke, actually. The quote I was referencing is, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." I actually wrote a (short) book on the ways of the Unix shell, which hopefully qualifies me to have an opinion on the matter. Although UHH is quite dated, there is and has been a great deal of legitimate criticism of Unix, and for that matter C and Bash as well. You have mistaken my opinion on the matter, but your eagerness in assigning negative qualities here is something you might want to examine. To be clear, I do consider Unix and Bash to be imperfect but essential tools for any programmer.

Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris

#279

Post by sethrin »

feld wrote: post #265
sethrin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example of its type ever to have been invented.

If there was something better than Unix it would be taking over the world by storm.

If there were something better than Unix we would replace Unix with that something and keep the name. But yes, that was the joke, and no, it was not a very good one.
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