*BSD News Article 85028


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From: peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.internals,comp.unix.osf.osf1
Subject: Re: Solaris 2.6
Date: 16 Dec 1996 19:35:47 GMT
Organization: Network/development platform support, NMTI
Lines: 38
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <5948aj$nci@web.nmti.com>
References: <32986299.AC7@mail.esrin.esa.it> <58n5q1$9ci@arktur.rz.uni-ulm.de> <58pdbt$mjv@web.nmti.com> <58r48o$t7q@arktur.rz.uni-ulm.de>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.solaris:92745 comp.unix.bsd.misc:1836 comp.unix.internals:11650 comp.unix.osf.osf1:17088

I'm dropping this here... this is my last response in this part of the thread.

In article <58r48o$t7q@arktur.rz.uni-ulm.de>,
Andreas Borchert <borchert@turing.mathematik.uni-ulm.de> wrote:
> Agreed. But this seems to be a common property of all commercial
> UNIX directions now. Once upon a time, there was a simple UNIX system
> named UNIX Edition VII.

I don't agree. Digital UNIX (apart from the licensing stuff, but I hate license
managers generally) is still pretty simple under the hood. System V release
4.0 is a lot simpler than Solaris, and even SVR4.2 (the last real System V
release) let you deal with a relatively simple low level environment if you
wanted.

(the Solaris device file system is awfully confusing)

> > (3) It doesn't provide good BSD administrative semantics.
> > 	(but it does use some BSD stuff as well)

> What are you missing here?

How about printcap? That'd be *really* nice.

> > (4) It's harder to port System V software to Solaris than to other
> >     System V boxes.
> > 	(that's UHC, Intel UNIX, Unixware, and Xenix software)

> I do *not* believe this -- I've even ported huge amounts of software
> (coming from System-V and from BSD environments) to early Solaris
> releases as Solaris 2.1 with nearly no problems.

I've had problems. The most fun was one that truncated the first two characters
of every file name when you did filename expansion because there were two
different sets of directory reading routines with different structures with
the same name, and which one you got depended on the path to the C compiler
you picked.
-- 
</peter>