[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI boot problem

[Reginald Beardsley]

FWIW

There is no justification for breaking the expectations of long time SunOS users because some other system does things differently.  The all too common practice of gratuitously breaking things because some twit thinks it should be different is why I don't like Gnu/Linux.

At one time, my work account mounted via NFS on 6 different flavors of Unix: AIX, SunOS, HP-UX. Irix, Ultrix and Clix (Intergraph's Sys V).  Because I typically had windows open on at least 4 or 5 of these at any time I had seven bin directories in ${HOME} to deal w/ this.

${HOME}/bin  - shell scripts that were system neutral

${HOME}/${ARCH}/bin - system specific scripts and links to preferred executables (e.g.  ${HOME}/SunOS/bin/df -> /usr/ucb/df )

This allowed me to make all the systems behave as I expected w/o further thought.  If I encountered a discrepancy I made the appropriate adjustment and went back to work.

SunOS has a long history of providing many flavors of commands. No one will object to adding a few.  However, changing the behavior of commands that have been around for 20+ years really doesn't make any sense.  Many of these are the way they are for very specific reasons.  Just because some group of users or potential users doesn't understand why is not a reason to change them.  If you feel compelled to disagree, please read
"Unix Style or cat -v Considered Harmful" first.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

There is certainly justification for a man page explaining the salient differences between Solaris and other systems.  But changing OpenIndiana to be something else is not a good idea.

Please note, I am not opposed to the deletion of features that have been deprecated for many years.  We desperately need to do that.  The partially completed transitions to new admin tools (e.g. smf(5)) can be really maddening if you're poking around something you don't deal w/ often.  Printer admin is pretty confusing w/ lp, lpr and cups all mashed up together.

But turning OpenIndiana into a Gnu/Linux  or *BSD distro won't get a larger user base.  Rather it will result in a smaller user base.

Have Fun!
Reg