[indiana-discuss] Standards ? An derivative proposal.

[Glynn Foster]

Hey,

David.Comay at Sun.COM wrote:
> John, I thought you were at the OpenSolaris Developer's Summit?
> Perhaps you missed my "talk" but the incremental approach was exactly
> one of the options that I discussed.  In many cases, it's exactly the
> right way to approach a particular command but there might be other
> cases where a replacement with another open-source alternative may be a
> better approach.

The real tricky bit is that adding features to existing Solaris commands is
always going to be a trial by error approach - we have a good idea as John
suggests that -j and z options in tar would be helpful, but there's literally
hundreds of options across the various user space utilities that we have no clue
people are using or not.

> Again, where is the loss of compatibility?  Or the intent to drop
> that?  Believe me, we're well aware that compatibility has been one of
> the more valuable attributes of Solaris.

And will certainly be the valuable attributes of OpenSolaris. However, absolute
compatibility out of the box *may* not be an absolute requirement - in those
cases we could make it easy to change your path, or install packages that aren't
by default to maintain that.



Glynn