[OpenIndiana-discuss] Help with website

[Dan Swartzendruber]

Gregory, I can second that.  I have a friend who is very experienced in
Linux and BSD and I was mentioning at dinner how I was using a SAN appliance
that was based on ZFS, and started extolling its virtues.  He asked me
(totally seriously) "ZFS is still around?  I thought all that stuff died
when Oracle bought Sun?"  This is the barrier we have to deal with.  Somehow
because I grumbled about commands being somewhat different, I got branded as
"one of them", when my original point was that we need to get people using
OI (or any other flavor for that matter), or it will end up a fringe system,
and ultimately die.  The technical merits don't matter in a lot of ways,
when perception comes into it (for you old fogies, think Betamax vs VHS -
think which was the better implementation, and which one ended up winning
the marketing battle...)  I've had this same fight some years back before
linux had plug and play desktop support - I tried to use some random distro
and was having incredible hassles getting X to work right.  I was on some
forum or other, and people were telling me what juju I had to perform on
various config files, and when I made the innocent remark that "with
windows, all I have to do is boot it, and it comes up with a usable
desktop!", and was flamed into the next county by the residents of that
forum.  I really like ZFS, and like I said, that was my only motivation in
getting involved in OI (I have enough stuff on my plate without learning yet
another flavor of Unix, but one even farther away than Linux variations or
even *BSD).  That said, I've had no real choice if I want ZFS, so I'm
learning the ropes.  I will say that the previous exchange I had here about
the absense of /etc/rc.local was a perfect example (albeit a minor one) of
the point I was thinking of.  Yes, in pretty much any of the flavors of Unix
using the /etc/init.d script system, you can get this to work.  Every Linux
distro I've used in the last N years provides the /etc/rc.local method for
those corner cases that don't go anywhere else, yet not one person here said
"yeah, you know, that IS a useful thing to have, maybe we should consider
it".