[advocacy-discuss] "What is OpenSolaris" page

[Jason King]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:00 AM, John Plocher <John.Plocher at sun.com> wrote:
> Joerg Schilling wrote:
>  > They tend to use the default PATH and then
>  > will e.g. get a chmod that does not support ACLs and a "tar" that does not
>  > create tar archives.
>
>  Lets not overreact - a sense of proportion is good.
>
>  As an Unix "Oldby" (going on 28 years...), I can blithfully say that
>  I have never used ACLs for anything and that I've never tripped over
>  any of the gnutar misbehaviors...

I've actually used them quite a bit at my old job as they were the
best solution for the situation. The alternative was chmod -R 777 or
n! groups.

>  The likelihood of a newby falling into this type of "unique to
>  OpenSolaris" problem seems remote at best, especially considering
>  that THEY ALREADY ARE DOING THINGS THAT WAY ON THEIR MACS AND LINUX
>  BOXES!
>
>  The target for OpenSolaris2008.05 is developers, not "never used
>  a computer before n00bs", and it is not unreasonable to presume that
>  developers already use Linux or Macs.

I thought one of the concepts was 'look at all this cool stuff you can
do on OpenSolaris that is hard/impossible on <other OS here>'.  People
aren't going to use features they don't know about.  Hiding or
otherwise making those features hard to discover (even if they aren't
as 'big' as ZFS or Dtrace, etc) just seems counterproductive.  We
should be doing just the opposite.  There are so many good things
about Solaris that aren't as well known as they should be imo (IPMP,
auditing, RBAC, BART, live upgrade/snap upgrade, etc.).  The easier
they are to discover, the more attractive OpenSolaris looks.