[illumos-Developer] ON is bloated and a bunch of stuff that doesn't need to be there should be ripped out (was Re: Heads up: perl 5.8.4 removal)

[Peter Tribble]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 7:44 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 19:02 +0000, Peter Tribble wrote:
>> > Its not a formal list... I'd have to go looking.  One thing that I do
>> > think we can probably clean up is the support for legacy SunOS 4.1 a.out
>> > executables.  Its been a few decades now, and I think the need to
>> > support executing such programs has long since passed.
>>
>> That's one place I disagree. I regard SunOS4.x binary compatibility as a
>> massive advantage - and I run a *lot* of stuff that way. Most of it simply
>> can't be rebuilt (no source, even if the company that made it was still in
>> existence) or replaced. Sun hardware and software has lifetimes
>> measured in decades; many companies rely on this (often unknowingly).
>
> Right, but can't these be run in an S10C zone or in a VM?

How does that help? We are talking sparc only here, so the VM options
are limited. (And one thing you need is to be able to run old software on
current hardware, so you might not have much choice on the OS
version.)

As for an S10C zone, does that actually take the code away, or just move it?

> At some point continuing to provide first class support for some this
> ancient stuff approaches insanity.

But has huge benefits.

I don't see it as too insane. It's not as if anything is changing. There's
no new stuff - we're not talking about a moving target here, so it's not
something that has to be continually updated.

One question is whether this support is impacting other code paths. In
which case I can see it being shoved off to the side.

> I'd like to know what stuff it is that still needs to be run this way.
> We are talking *really* old software here... much of it would probably
> have been written before some of our participants were even *born*.

Hey, I'm not *that* old!

And one thing here is that once you get this problem, you're talking about
really old applications. So old that they can't be updated or fixed. Sometimes
you have data in a format that can only be read by an old application.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/