Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy

eldavojohn writes "Ian Murdock (Debian author & Sun's OS Chief) made some comments about Project Indiana that many have said is an attempt to make Solaris simply "more Linux-like." But Murdock quashes any concerns that this is just another Linux clone — muddying up the waters of distribution selection. He says that it's more a 'best of both worlds' attempt to make an OS that appeals to a broader audience. From the article, "Project Indiana will include a revamped package management system, which should prove popular with developers unaccustomed to Solaris. The OS has some clunky, archaic aspects, and Murdock thinks the new package system will modernize Solaris.""

Comments

package management

[Peter La Casse]

It would be great to see Solaris become tightly integrated with something like apt. pkg-get is ok, but it isn't currently used for all packages, and a Sun-backed and -improved version would be better. For example, I'd like to see it manage security updates in a way that meets the needs of Solaris sysadmins, with separate actions for downloading, applying and rolling back. I'd also like to see my attempts to install gvim not download 50 megabytes worth of libraries that are already on my system, in a slightly different version number.

Good Gnus?

[otis wildflower]

Beyond fixing software distribution and pkg mgmt (which is lonnnnngggg overdue!!), how about making GNU utils the default and tossing the archaic Solaris versions of common tools into some compat directory? If the GNU tool doesn't support some Solarisism (like, say, RBAC or extended attributes), hack the GNU tool and release the change as GPL.

Oh, and while you're refactoring, please fix JES. It is a clusterfuck mess, particularly the Delegated Administrator.

Re:solaris is starting to sound good

[AaronW]

Exactly. I can't count how many scripts fail on Solaris 9 because of Sun's /bin/sh missing some key functionality (usually replacing it with /bin/bash fixes it). And why should scripts have to hunt around all over the place just to find a working version of very common tools (like Sun's sed which used to be quite broken). And some very useful features are always missing (recursive grep anyone).

Trying to compile GNU software on Solaris 9 is often a painful experience because even their libc and header files are in the dark ages (i.e. many ISO C99 features are missing). I haven't tried Solaris 10 and moved on to Linux at work.