[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Kay Parker]

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guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major
layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
future.

The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12— has
apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version is
apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
2021.

With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community revolt.
Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
of the software platform. '
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/

-- 
  Kay Parker       
  kayparker at mailite.com

-- 
http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Wesley Parish]

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I suppose that set of rumours will lead to people shifting to the FOSS versions
of Solaris and SPARC.

Wesley Parish

Quoting Kay Parker 	  <kayparker at mailite.com>:

> guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
> 'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
> planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with
> major
> layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
> speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
> with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
> Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
> demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
> the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
> future.
> 
> The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12—
> has
> apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
> Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version
> is
> apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
> 2021.
> 
> With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
> been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
> attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
> bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
> significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community
> revolt.
> Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
> expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
> of the software platform. '
>
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/
> 
> -- 
>  Kay Parker 
>  kayparker at mailite.com
> 
> -- 
> http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
> 
>  



"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Arthur Krewat]

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Let's hope they do the right thing and release Solaris into the wild 
again. ZFS in particular.

Personally, I think they are making a huge mistake. What are they going 
to do, move to Linux? Oh, right... the "cloud" will be Linux.

Blech.

On 1/19/2017 3:49 AM, Wesley Parish wrote:
> I suppose that set of rumours will lead to people shifting to the FOSS versions
> of Solaris and SPARC.
>
> Wesley Parish
>
> Quoting Kay Parker 	  <kayparker at mailite.com>:
>
>> guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
>> 'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
>> planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with
>> major
>> layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
>> speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
>> with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
>> Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
>> demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
>> the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
>> future.
>>
>> The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12—
>> has
>> apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
>> Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version
>> is
>> apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
>> 2021.
>>
>> With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
>> been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
>> attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
>> bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
>> significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community
>> revolt.
>> Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
>> expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
>> of the software platform. '
>>
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/
>> -- 
>>   Kay Parker
>>   kayparker at mailite.com
>>
>> -- 
>> http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
>>
>>   
>
>
> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
> Method for Guitar
>
> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn
>
>

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Tim Bradshaw]

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Well, they are probably reacting to what their customers want which, in my experience working at a fairly typical customer up to a couple of years ago, is indeed Linux.  That's kind of sad, but Linux, much though I'd like to hate it, is unfortunately both a significantly more pleasant experience as a user & administrator, and a lot easier to hire people for.  It's 20 years too late for Solaris to have a future.

> On 19 Jan 2017, at 14:40, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> 
> Let's hope they do the right thing and release Solaris into the wild again. ZFS in particular.
> 
> Personally, I think they are making a huge mistake. What are they going to do, move to Linux? Oh, right... the "cloud" will be Linux.
> 
> Blech.
> 
>> On 1/19/2017 3:49 AM, Wesley Parish wrote:
>> I suppose that set of rumours will lead to people shifting to the FOSS versions
>> of Solaris and SPARC.
>> 
>> Wesley Parish
>> 
>> Quoting Kay Parker      <kayparker at mailite.com>:
>> 
>>> guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
>>> 'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
>>> planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with
>>> major
>>> layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
>>> speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
>>> with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
>>> Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
>>> demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
>>> the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
>>> future.
>>> 
>>> The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12—
>>> has
>>> apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
>>> Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version
>>> is
>>> apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
>>> 2021.
>>> 
>>> With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
>>> been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
>>> attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
>>> bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
>>> significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community
>>> revolt.
>>> Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
>>> expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
>>> of the software platform. '
>>> 
>> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/
>>> -- 
>>>  Kay Parker
>>>  kayparker at mailite.com
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
>>> 
>>>  
>> 
>> 
>> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
>> Method for Guitar
>> 
>> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn
>> 
>> 
> 

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Arthur Krewat]

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Have you used Solaris 11, especially up to 11.3? I find Linux and it's 
recently evolving service and network configuration methods to be a bit 
of a pain. The biggest example of this was the loss of ifconfig from the 
minimal install of Redhat/Centos recently. Manually installing nettools 
just to get it back, when every other UNIX still has it is exasperating.

If you're a Linux-only house, and even then are up-to-date and use only 
one or two distros of Linux, I get it. But if, like me, you administer 
multiple distros, versions, and then start moving across AIX, HP/UX and 
Solaris, it's another glaring example of "we're going it alone" (again).

For what it's worth, I've been administering a PeopleSoft environment 
built entirely on Solaris x86 (half of it virtualized) for quite a few 
years, and it's been trouble-free. All the other Linux distros I 
administer have had their own idiosyncrasies and bugs. Not to mention 
the glaring security holes that have come out in the past 2 years. 
Conversely, I've also administered some SFHA clusters on Redhat and 
they've been flawless too.

But I digress. This is not supposed to be a "bash Linux" thread :)


On 1/19/2017 11:39 AM, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> Well, they are probably reacting to what their customers want which, in my experience working at a fairly typical customer up to a couple of years ago, is indeed Linux.  That's kind of sad, but Linux, much though I'd like to hate it, is unfortunately both a significantly more pleasant experience as a user & administrator, and a lot easier to hire people for.  It's 20 years too late for Solaris to have a future.
>
>> On 19 Jan 2017, at 14:40, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
>>
>> Let's hope they do the right thing and release Solaris into the wild again. ZFS in particular.
>>
>> Personally, I think they are making a huge mistake. What are they going to do, move to Linux? Oh, right... the "cloud" will be Linux.
>>
>> Blech.
>>
>>> On 1/19/2017 3:49 AM, Wesley Parish wrote:
>>> I suppose that set of rumours will lead to people shifting to the FOSS versions
>>> of Solaris and SPARC.
>>>
>>> Wesley Parish
>>>
>>> Quoting Kay Parker      <kayparker at mailite.com>:
>>>
>>>> guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
>>>> 'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
>>>> planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with
>>>> major
>>>> layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
>>>> speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
>>>> with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
>>>> Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
>>>> demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
>>>> the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
>>>> future.
>>>>
>>>> The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12—
>>>> has
>>>> apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
>>>> Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version
>>>> is
>>>> apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
>>>> 2021.
>>>>
>>>> With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
>>>> been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
>>>> attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
>>>> bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
>>>> significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community
>>>> revolt.
>>>> Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
>>>> expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
>>>> of the software platform. '
>>>>
>>> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/
>>>> -- 
>>>>   Kay Parker
>>>>   kayparker at mailite.com
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>
>>> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
>>> Method for Guitar
>>>
>>> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn
>>>
>>>
>
>

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Nick Downing]

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I kind of differ here, I know I'm throwing fat into the fire but....

I had to use Solaris at uni when I started my degree 10yrs ago. It was
at Melbourne University which DID have a very good computer science
programme, you had to learn lots of low-level stuff like C and basic
Unix programming, etc. I also used to tutor, and I remember I taught a
course about MIPS assembly language using an emulator, which I believe
all CS majors had to do. Obviously there was plenty of high-level
stuff too (I taught a course on SQL relational algebra and so on), but
what I remember is you had to learn Solaris in first year, and you had
to basically know your way around the system, I recall there was a
course that included a shell programming component too.

Well much as I completely agree that graduates should be taught C and
Unix, I found Solaris to be a pretty bad platform. I guess the core of
my dissatisfaction stems from it being different to Linux, and so I
suppose Solaris religious people are going to say "GNU is an
ABOMINATION it should NEVER HAVE INTRODUCED LONG COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS
and ALL THE TOOLS CONTAIN USELESS FEATURES" and so on... and they are
right... but nevertheless I found it much less useable and I felt a
lot of the tools had rough edges, as well as changing "mkdir
--parents" into "mkdir -p" you had to account for different behaviour
which was in most cases more naive.

So, because of this the sysadmins had installed a whole boatload of
GNU tools into places like /opt/gcc-(VERSION) or
/opt/coreutils-(VERSION), and if you had to use a specific feature of
say, "ls" or "find" or "sort" that wasn't in the Solaris tool, you had
to exhaustively list the long pathname to the GNU tool in your script.
The sysadmins did this kind of piecemeal in the system's scripts like
.profile and the result was basically a total mess, I don't know how
you would have explained all this to a naive student. Not to mention
that the directory structure of the student servers had involved into
a huge mess over a decade or more with lots of stuff installed in
weird places that was referred to in the course material that the
teachers had developed, i.e. our IP investment relied totally on this
strange Solaris installation.

I gather that the coursework has been significantly dumbed down now
with the introduction of the so-called "Melbourne Model", it was very
controversial at the time, but basically means you learn only dumbed
down stuff at undergraduate level, and to get a real degree you have
to do a Masters at least. I believe the Solaris student servers are
still running but I don't think the coursework uses them anymore, it's
all Python- and web-based now. When my sister did the course recently
all her assignments were done by logging into a website and running a
Python-based IDE via the website which would run her Python scripts
and show her the results right there in the browser. Hmm.

So I digress but anyway, I would have taken the opportunity to change
all the coursework to refer to a Linux student server with all the
normal tools installed in the expected places. I always found the
Solaris system to be pretty much like stepping back in time. And I do
not really understand why corporations would want to run Solaris when
Linux is vastly more developed. I guess maybe they have a big
investment in Solaris based tools and networks (perhaps stuff like Sun
Grid Engine), but I would think it would be easier to port all this to
Linux than to continue bashing one's head against a brick wall in
trying to get this outdated and proprietary system to become modern.
Much as I love BSD I feel that much the same argument applies to
FreeBSD as well, it will simply never be as developed/mature as Linux.

cheers, Nick


On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 1:40 AM, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> Let's hope they do the right thing and release Solaris into the wild again.
> ZFS in particular.
>
> Personally, I think they are making a huge mistake. What are they going to
> do, move to Linux? Oh, right... the "cloud" will be Linux.
>
> Blech.
>
> On 1/19/2017 3:49 AM, Wesley Parish wrote:
>>
>> I suppose that set of rumours will lead to people shifting to the FOSS
>> versions
>> of Solaris and SPARC.
>>
>> Wesley Parish
>>
>> Quoting Kay Parker        <kayparker at mailite.com>:
>>
>>> guess it is the beginning of the end of Solaris and the Sparc CPU:
>>> 'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was
>>> planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with
>>> major
>>> layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others
>>> speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired
>>> with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the
>>> Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its
>>> demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for
>>> the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a
>>> future.
>>>
>>> The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12—
>>> has
>>> apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap.
>>> Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version
>>> is
>>> apparently the only update planned for the operating system through
>>> 2021.
>>>
>>> With its on-premises software and hardware sales in decline, Oracle has
>>> been undergoing a major reorganization over the past two years as it
>>> attempts to pivot toward the cloud. Those changes led to a major speed
>>> bump in the development cycle for Java Enterprise Edition, a slowdown
>>> significant enough that it spurred something of a Java community
>>> revolt.
>>> Oracle later announced a new roadmap for Java EE that recalibrated
>>> expectations, focusing on cloud services features for the next version
>>> of the software platform. '
>>>
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/
>>>
>>> --
>>>   Kay Parker
>>>   kayparker at mailite.com
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand
>> Sor,
>> Method for Guitar
>>
>> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
>> Goldwyn
>>
>>
>

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Joerg Schilling]

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Nick Downing <downing.nick at gmail.com> wrote:

> right... but nevertheless I found it much less useable and I felt a
> lot of the tools had rough edges, as well as changing "mkdir
> --parents" into "mkdir -p" you had to account for different behaviour
> which was in most cases more naive.

mkdir introduced the -p option with SunOS-4.0 (Spring 1988).
This is long before gmkdir apeared....you need to correct your standoint.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Random832]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017, at 06:24, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Nick Downing <downing.nick at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > right... but nevertheless I found it much less useable and I felt a
> > lot of the tools had rough edges, as well as changing "mkdir
> > --parents" into "mkdir -p" you had to account for different behaviour
> > which was in most cases more naive.
> 
> mkdir introduced the -p option with SunOS-4.0 (Spring 1988).
> This is long before gmkdir apeared....you need to correct your standoint.

I think his assertion is that he personally had originally learned the
command as "mkdir --parents" [which was and is GNU-only], and had to
change to spelling it "-p" when going to non-linux systems, along with
some unspecified behavior differences.

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Joerg Schilling]

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Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

> I think his assertion is that he personally had originally learned the
> command as "mkdir --parents" [which was and is GNU-only], and had to
> change to spelling it "-p" when going to non-linux systems, along with
> some unspecified behavior differences.

This is why I call Linux a system that tries to establich a vendor lock in.

Man pages could have been written in a way that makes it obvious that --parents 
is non-portable, but they rather encourage people to learn gnu long options.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Fri, 20 Jan 2017, Joerg Schilling wrote:

> Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think his assertion is that he personally had originally learned the
>> command as "mkdir --parents" [which was and is GNU-only], and had to
>> change to spelling it "-p" when going to non-linux systems, along with
>> some unspecified behavior differences.
>
> This is why I call Linux a system that tries to establich a vendor lock in.
>
> Man pages could have been written in a way that makes it obvious that --parents
> is non-portable, but they rather encourage people to learn gnu long options.
>
> Jörg
>
>

I blame GNU rather than the Linux people.  GNU are just as much masters of 
"embrace, extend, exterminate" as Microsoft.

I've thought of trying to build a "GNUless" Linux distribution with a 
purer Unix feel, but I get hung trying to step myself through the process.

-uso.

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Arthur Krewat]

I agree. Why would anyone ever write a piece of software that has 
multiple versions of options, when there's no need for the extra wordy 
versions? In the mkdir source, there is no conditionals around anything 
to do with "static struct option const longopts[]" - so there's no 
environment where they wouldn't exist.

 From man page for mkdir on a RedHat 6.8 install:

*       -m, --mode=MODE*
               set file mode (as in chmod), not a=rwx - umask

*       -p, --parents*
               no error if existing, make parent directories as needed

*       -v, --verbose*
               print a message for each created directory

*       -Z, --context=CTX*
               set the SELinux security context of each created 
directory to CTX

               When  COREUTILS_CHILD_DEFAULT_ACLS environment variable 
is set, -p/--parents option respects default umask and ACLs, as it does
               in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 by default

        --help display this help and exit

        --version
               output version information and exit

Oh, and an old-man rant: get off my lawn.


On 1/20/2017 9:29 AM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
> I blame GNU rather than the Linux people.  GNU are just as much 
> masters of "embrace, extend, exterminate" as Microsoft.
>
> I've thought of trying to build a "GNUless" Linux distribution with a 
> purer Unix feel, but I get hung trying to step myself through the 
> process.
>
> -uso.

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[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Andy Kosela]

On Friday, January 20, 2017, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org
<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tfb at tfeb.org');>> wrote:
>
> And it's also why they slowly die: their market ends up being people who
> have huge critical legacy systems which they need to maintain, not people
> who are building new systems.  Indeed even the people with the great legacy
> chunks of software, when they build new systems, start using the shiny new
> platforms, because the shiny young people they hire to do this like the new
> platforms.
>
>
>
I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, but it
is actually not "a new platform" anymore.  It has been deployed (along with
FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now.  It really
became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers.

Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS
standardization comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true
Unix standard than hundreds of incompatible ones.

I believe that the future of proprietary UNIX is doomed and the only
remaining choices for server operating systems will be Linux and Windows in
the near future.  If you think about it, the future is already here...

--Andy
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[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[tfb]

On 20 Jan 2017, at 15:45, Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
> 
> I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, but it is actually not "a new platform" anymore.  It has been deployed (along with FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now.  It really became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers.

The people I'm talking about (who might be characterised as 'COBOL shops') are not early adopters: 20 years is about how long it takes for them to decide something is safe.  Yes, of course Linux has been everywhere for a long time, but ten years ago it almost certainly was not involved in running your bank account, while today it almost certainly is.

> Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS standardization comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true Unix standard than hundreds of incompatible ones.

'Linux' and 'OS standardisation' are funny phrases to see in the same sentence.  (Note: I work in an exclusively Linux HPC environment: I am not some anti-Linux holdout, I just have previously worked in the above-mentioned environments and I appreciate their needs and fears).

I think this is probably off-topic tor TUHS, sorry.
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[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Nemo]

On 20 January 2017 at 11:30,  <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote (in part):
> 'Linux' and 'OS standardisation' are funny phrases to see in the same
> sentence.

As they say, 'ave a laugh, guv:
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43781

N.

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 20 Jan 2017, at 19:38, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As they say, 'ave a laugh, guv:
> http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43781
> 

You have not understood the problem I was describing I think: things like POSIX or LSB do not solve it: if they did it would be trivial to port <awful mass of scripts> between platforms, and it is not, because <awful mass of scripts> will always rely on behaviour which is outwith the standard, whatever the standard may be.  These standards solve the problem of making well-written code portable, but your bank is not held together by well-written code, unfortunately.

An interesting approach would be platforms which only supported the standard they purport to conform to (ie there would be no additional functionality at all): such platforms would make porting things more easy, but they would also be mostly indistinguishable from each other and thus eliminate most of the competition between vendors.  They would also be impossibly austere of course.
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[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Rico Pajarola]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 1:25 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:
>
> An interesting approach would be platforms which *only* supported the
> standard they purport to conform to (ie there would be no additional
> functionality at all): such platforms would make porting things more easy,
> but they would also be mostly indistinguishable from each other and thus
> eliminate most of the competition between vendors.  They would also be
> impossibly austere of course.
>
that's more or less what Solaris is doing, and why the defaults seem
archaic to people who've only ever used Linux.

You can change the "feel" of the Solaris (by adding/removing/rearranging
stuff in $PATH) from SysV (/usr/bin), BSD (/usr/ucb), the "X/Open standard"
(/usr/xpg4/bin), to GNU (/usr/gnu/bin). I might have missed some. AIUI
/usr/xpg4 mostly exists in order to pass the standards tests ;)

I really despised the "messiness" in Linux where the choice was either
stable and outdated to the point of being useless (Debian until they got
their act together), stable but patched beyond recognition (anything
"Enterprise"), or bleeding edge where entire subsystems can get exchanged
at any time without warning (anything "Desktop"). I was clinging to real
systems like Solaris and FreeBSD, but eventually I gave up and I'm not
looking back. The ease of getting stuff to work (hardware and software)
greatly outweighs the lack of elegance and the occasional breakage due to
unexpected changes. And there's another kind of elegance in being able to
boot Linux on any random PC and have at least graphics, network, and
storage work out of the box (most of the time anyway. Solaris never stood a
chance on that front). Software gets installed with a simple "yum install
foo" or "apt-get install foo" command. At some point Solaris also lost the
performance race and that was pretty much it.

I loved Solaris while it was alive and even when it was on life support.
Oracle killing Solaris came hardly as a surprise to anyone. The writing has
been on the wall for a while, in bold and blinking. I'm only surprised it
took so long...
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[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Arthur Krewat]

Take another look at Solaris 11 - the pkg command is basically the same 
thing. Install PHP, MYSQL, Apache, update the system, do almost anything.

I've booted Solaris 11 on a slew of servers and PC's since it came out. 
 From Intel SATA to LSI SAS, Emulex fiber channel cards, Qlogic fiber 
cards, Intel 10Gbe NICs, etc.

It just "works". While you had to pay attention to the HCL back in the 
Solaris 7/8/9 and early 10 days, and adjust accordingly, Solaris has 
been pretty decent in the past few years in terms of hardware 
compatibility.  Except for one horrid instance where the Emulex driver 
would fail if virtualization was turned on - but in 11.3, that seems to 
have been fixed (or, the hardware changed, I installed it on newer M630 
Dell hardware).

For the "desktop" however, I just don't use it as a desktop. Windows won 
that war for me.

As for performance, I'll have to look into that - I remember a while 
back that Oracle's best practices for it's database was to turn off NUMA 
under Linux, but not Solaris. Either way, virtualization (VMware mostly) 
has made that a moot point in many of the environments I administer.

On 1/20/2017 8:58 PM, Rico Pajarola wrote:
> And there's another kind of elegance in being able to boot Linux on 
> any random PC and have at least graphics, network, and storage work 
> out of the box (most of the time anyway. Solaris never stood a chance 
> on that front). Software gets installed with a simple "yum install 
> foo" or "apt-get install foo" command. At some point Solaris also lost 
> the performance race and that was pretty much it.

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Rico Pajarola]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 12:32 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:

> Take another look at Solaris 11 - the pkg command is basically the same
> thing. Install PHP, MYSQL, Apache, update the system, do almost anything.
>
I've used Solaris 2.5.1, 8, 10, and 11 extensively. The pkg command was
cool (and so was blastwave's pkg-get before pkg was incorporated into the
base system), but it was always some kind of "poor-mans" yum/apt-get (with
occasional manual surgery required to make stuff work).

I've booted Solaris 11 on a slew of servers and PC's since it came out.
> From Intel SATA to LSI SAS, Emulex fiber channel cards, Qlogic fiber cards,
> Intel 10Gbe NICs, etc.

that wasn't my experience. HW support in Solaris 11 was orders of magnitude
better than older versions, especially (and surprisingly) on laptops, but
any random network card or SATA/SAS controller (if it wasn't
3com/Realtek/Intel/LSI) had a good chance of not working out of the box, or
at all.

Solaris 11 had a lot of cool, even "linux-y" things, but it was too little,
too late, and Oracle immediately killed whatever velocity they had when
they took over. But at this point, we were already actively getting rid of
it anyway (10 was the last version we deployed in production before jumping
ship).
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[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Nemo]

On 20 January 2017 at 19:25, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2017, at 19:38, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> As they say, 'ave a laugh, guv:
> http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43781
> You have not understood the problem I was describing I think:

I did understand.  My response was to your comment about Linux and
standards in the same sentence.  (This was humour, indicated by the
phrase 'ave a laugh.)

> [...] such platforms would make porting things more easy, but they would
> also be mostly indistinguishable from each other and thus eliminate most of
> the competition between vendors.

Well, I believe that was the original intent of POSIX as far as the
Pentagon was concerned.  It (and other countries) wanted source that
could be recompiled/run on any POSIX box.

N.

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2622 bytes --]

Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
 |On Friday, January 20, 2017, Tim Bradshaw <[1]tfb at tfeb.org[/1]> wrote: \
 |And it's also why they slowly die: their market ends up being people \
 |who have 
 |huge critical legacy systems which they need to maintain, not people \
 |who are building new systems.  Indeed even the people with the great \
 |legacy chunks 
 |of software, when they build new systems, start using the shiny new \
 |platforms, because the shiny young people they hire to do this like \
 |the new 
 |platforms.
 |
 |  [1] javascript:_e(%7B%7D,&#39;cvml&#39;,&#39;tfb at tfeb.org&#39;);

(Couldn't resist, sorry.)

 |I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, \
 |but it is actually not "a new platform" anymore.  It has been deployed \
 |(along with 
 |FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now.  It really \
 |became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers.
 |
 |Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS standardiz\
 |ation comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true Unix standard 
 |than hundreds of incompatible ones.

I am really glad with the POSIX standard, that, if in doubt, not
few members of this list have anticipated in.  And if it is that
they have thought or implemented the foundations that lead to
POSIX.  Note that i am really happy with it, but without it
nothing but ISO C would be there.  And then i would rather boot
a Plan9/9front/(9atom) system and adore so much the manuals that
have been written by the really good ones.  And if just for the
spirit from in between the lines.

 |I believe that the future of proprietary UNIX is doomed and the only \
 |remaining choices for server operating systems will be Linux and Windows \
 |in the 
 |near future.  If you think about it, the future is already here...

Not to start throwing with something that stinks, but in practice
my resource files from FreeBSD 4.7 are still in use for 10.3.
I never setup a server as such until January 2016, and i had
a FreeBSD one running via inetd on one afternoon.
And in general one thing that i for one would never overestimate
is the documentation, and even though Linux has so much improved,
the /usr/share isn't there, which is think is a real pity for
young programmers, which may possibly never access doc.cat-v.org.
Maybe they have a good professor.  And the release information of
FreeBSD and also OpenBSD really is appreciated so much by someone
like me, who has neither time nor interest to stay totally
up-to-date regarding Linux kernel and GNU userland development!

--steffen

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Kay Parker]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3161 bytes --]

I'm running fedora25 beside my Linuxmint 18.1 installation. fedora25
means fully featured systemd and wayland on the top of the super fast
Linux (kernel) 4.9. 
Linux thats were the story goes. Solaris etc. just running behind in the
past.

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017, at 12:30 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> wrote:
>  |On Friday, January 20, 2017, Tim Bradshaw <[1]tfb at tfeb.org[/1]> wrote:
>  \
>  |And it's also why they slowly die: their market ends up being people \
>  |who have 
>  |huge critical legacy systems which they need to maintain, not people \
>  |who are building new systems.  Indeed even the people with the great \
>  |legacy chunks 
>  |of software, when they build new systems, start using the shiny new \
>  |platforms, because the shiny young people they hire to do this like \
>  |the new 
>  |platforms.
>  |
>  |  [1] javascript:_e(%7B%7D,&#39;cvml&#39;,&#39;tfb at tfeb.org&#39;);
> 
> (Couldn't resist, sorry.)
> 
>  |I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, \
>  |but it is actually not "a new platform" anymore.  It has been deployed
>  \
>  |(along with 
>  |FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now.  It really \
>  |became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers.
>  |
>  |Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS
>  standardiz\
>  |ation comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true Unix standard 
>  |than hundreds of incompatible ones.
> 
> I am really glad with the POSIX standard, that, if in doubt, not
> few members of this list have anticipated in.  And if it is that
> they have thought or implemented the foundations that lead to
> POSIX.  Note that i am really happy with it, but without it
> nothing but ISO C would be there.  And then i would rather boot
> a Plan9/9front/(9atom) system and adore so much the manuals that
> have been written by the really good ones.  And if just for the
> spirit from in between the lines.
> 
>  |I believe that the future of proprietary UNIX is doomed and the only \
>  |remaining choices for server operating systems will be Linux and
>  Windows \
>  |in the 
>  |near future.  If you think about it, the future is already here...
> 
> Not to start throwing with something that stinks, but in practice
> my resource files from FreeBSD 4.7 are still in use for 10.3.
> I never setup a server as such until January 2016, and i had
> a FreeBSD one running via inetd on one afternoon.
> And in general one thing that i for one would never overestimate
> is the documentation, and even though Linux has so much improved,
> the /usr/share isn't there, which is think is a real pity for
> young programmers, which may possibly never access doc.cat-v.org.
> Maybe they have a good professor.  And the release information of
> FreeBSD and also OpenBSD really is appreciated so much by someone
> like me, who has neither time nor interest to stay totally
> up-to-date regarding Linux kernel and GNU userland development!
> 
> --steffen


-- 
  Kay Parker       
  kayparker at mailite.com

-- 
http://www.fastmail.com - The way an email service should be

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Kay Parker 	  <kayparker at mailite.com> wrote:
 |I'm running fedora25 beside my Linuxmint 18.1 installation. fedora25
 |means fully featured systemd and wayland on the top of the super fast
 |Linux (kernel) 4.9. 
 |Linux thats were the story goes. Solaris etc. just running behind in the
 |past.

Well i am currently running Alpine on the server (i can't recall
the name of the init system they use at the moment, it is what
Debian had and Gentoo i think still has; i don't like it, e.g., it
cannot perform proper restart if one of the processes fails to
stand up again, you have to start them all one by one, then, which
is -- let aside how complicated it is to program and maintain such
an init system, it is a science! -- mysterious to me given that it
gets the dependencies right in normal conditions, and has so much
state laying around; and note it will run FreeBSD again at some
later time, it was just that i haven't really cared for Linux
since i have discovered FreeBSD 4.7, and really felt i need to
learn about it again after so and so many years, and then it was
2016, and it was clear what that would mean, and then it was David
Bowie, etc.

And CRUX-Linux, which is totally underrated, and uses a wonderful
unagitated BSD-like approach, i'm looking forward for their new
3.3, in a not too distant future!  And VoidLinux, which has a very
fine package manager and uses runit, which i think is a really
pragmatic, smart, and very small, init system that also is
completely underrated.

I hope all these systems can survive the very way their developers
drive them up the road.  I couldn't say, i really love the BSD
way, but of course the Linux kernel is _so_ supportive, i really
like CRUX.  And Void, it is not even graphical no more by default.
ArchLinux i have, too, in fact it is my main system since my main
machine died.  Arch uses systemd.  Yes, i don't like systemd.
Void is even more surfing the edge than Arch as of today, isn't
that amazing?  It has a shutdown time of 1 second.

  Linux wales 4.8.13-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Dec 9 07:24:34 CET 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux
  Linux irish 4.9.5_1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jan 20 14:48:47 UTC 2017 i686 GNU/Linux

--steffen

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 21 Jan 2017, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:

> Well i am currently running Alpine on the server (i can't recall
> the name of the init system they use at the moment, it is what
> Debian had and Gentoo i think still has

sysvinit?

-uso.

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Kurt H Maier]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 07:09:00PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Jan 2017, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> 
> > Well i am currently running Alpine on the server (i can't recall
> > the name of the init system they use at the moment, it is what
> > Debian had and Gentoo i think still has
> 
> sysvinit?
> 
> -uso.

OpenRC.  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC

khm

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 20 Jan 2017, at 02:00, Nick Downing <downing.nick at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I always found the
> Solaris system to be pretty much like stepping back in time. And I do
> not really understand why corporations would want to run Solaris when
> Linux is vastly more developed.

This is actually exactly why they run it, and also what will lead to its (probable) demise.

Large commercial organisations are entirely made of systems which were written (or, more likely, constructed from a bunch of large third-party bits held together with locally-written glue) a long time ago, which perform some purpose which is assumed to be critical, and which no-one now understands.  They are *assumed* to be critical because no-one dares to poke at them to find out if they really are: if perturbing some system might result in your ATMs not working, you don't, ever, perturb it, even if there is a very good chance that it won't.

These systems need to be maintained somehow, which means two things at the OS level and below (it means related but other things above the OS level): the hardware and OS has to be supportable, and the OS has to pass various standards, usually related to security.  This in turn means that the HW and OS need to be kept reasonably current.

But on top of the OS sits a great mass of code which no-one understands and which certainly was not written by people who understood, well, anything really.  So there will very definitely be hard-wired assumptions about things like filesystem layout and the exact behaviour of various tools, and equally definitely there will not be any checks that things are behaving well: the people who write this stuff are not people who check exit codes.

So, since you need to deploy new versions of the OS, these new versions need to be *very compatible indeed* with old versions.

Technically, this isn't incompatible with adding new features, so long as you don't break the old ones.  But in practice the risk of doing so is so high that things tend to get pretty frozen (have you tested that the behaviour of your new 'mkdir' is compatible in every case with the old one, including in cases where the old one fails but the new one might not, because some code somewhere will be relying on that).  So new features tend to get added off to the side, leaving the old thing alone.

And that's why systems like Solaris seem old-fashioned: they're not old-fashioned, they're just extremely compatible.

And it's also why they slowly die: their market ends up being people who have huge critical legacy systems which they need to maintain, not people who are building new systems.  Indeed even the people with the great legacy chunks of software, when they build new systems, start using the shiny new platforms, because the shiny young people they hire to do this like the new platforms.

Of course, no lessons are ever learned, so these shiny new systems are no more robust than the old ones were, meaning that the currently shiny new platforms they are built on will also gradually deteriorate into the slow death of compatibility (or they won't, and the ATMS will indeed stop working: I am not sure which is the worse outcome)

--tim

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Joerg Schilling]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 926 bytes --]

Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> wrote:

> I suppose that set of rumours will lead to people shifting to the FOSS versions
> of Solaris and SPARC.

I would be happy if we had a commonly accepted OSS line for OpenSolaris 
development.

The current problem is that the payers in that game all have commercial 
interests and removed many parts from the sources that they believe are not 
needed anymore.

Another problem is that the closed source i18n parts of libc in Illumos have 
been replaced by a FreeBSD implementation version that is not POSIX compliant.

So for today, there is development but only in order to meet particular 
interests.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

[Rudi Blom]

I'm a bit puzzled, but then I only ever worked with some version of
Ultrix and an AT&T flavour of UNIX in Philips, SCO 3.2V4.2 (OpenServer
3ish), DEC Digital UNIX, Tru64, HP-UX 1123/11.31 and only ever used
"mkdir -p".

Some differences in the various versions are easily solved in scripts,
like shown below. Not the best of examples, but easy. Getting it to
work on a linux flavour wouldn't be too difficult :-)

OS_TYPE=`uname -n`
case "${OS_TYPE}" in
	"OSF1")
		PATH=".:/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/xyz/shell:/xyz/appl/unix/bin:/xyz/utils:"
		TZ="THA-7"
		;;
	"HP-UX")
		PATH=".:/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/contrib/bin:/xyz/field/scripts:/xyz/shell:/xyz/appl/unix/bin:/xyz/utils:"
		TZ="TST-7"
		;;
	*)
		echo "${OS_TYPE} unknown, exit"
		exit 1
		;;
esac