[indiana-discuss] [advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 Available

[Joerg Schilling]

Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at Sun.COM> wrote:

> >> The old shell is now:
> >> /usr/has/bin/sh
> > 
> > Well, then Sun seems to start an incompatible fork from OpenSolaris.
> > 
>
> Sigh.  We have made no statements about compatibility with anything, 
> either past or future, in the preview releases.  It's an experiment. 

Sun did make statements about long term compatibility and many Solaris users
did stay with Solaris _because_ of these statements.

> The negativity some of you have towards experiments just amazes me 
> sometimes.

You may like to call it "negativity" from the view you have on the problem.

I call it the result of 26 years of experiences with UNIX hacking.

With the right skills, you do not need to do every possible experiment because
you already know the results or because you know that the constraints under 
which you run the experiment are not sufficient to give useful results at all.


What I did (adding a command line editor with file name completion to the 
Bourne Shell) _can_ be tested in an experimental OpenSolaris distribution
like SchilliX or Indiana. This can be said because there is a single line of
code that needs to be done right in order to avoid problems. If we like to make 
/sbin/sh a useful shell for interactive use, we just need to make sure that
the editor code is not activated under the wrong circumstances. This definitely 
can be tested by checking _only_ the functionality inside Solaris because there 
is a higher variance in usage (for this particular problem) than external users
would introduce.

I still detected a minor problem on Tuesday (after 14 days of testing) that will 
fixed with SchilliX-0.6.3


You however cannot test a /sbin/sh /bin/ksh93 change inside Solaris only. 
Indiana definitely has the wrong audience to give expressive testing depth for 
this highly complex change. You only would reach the right testers audience if 
you created a beta distribution that would be tested by industrial or financial
customers in real world environments. Indiana is mainly targeted for individuals
that used Linux before.....so you cannot use results from an Indiana based test
for a Solaris change with high risk potential.



Jörg

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