[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)

[Dennis Clarke]

> So, you have a time lapse of only seven years (16 years from the minor
> release of SunOS 4.1.4). Sun 'officially' wanted its customer base to
> migrate to Solaris 10 and ended sun4m hardware support as well. Sun did
> several corporate presentations in light of these facts as well as mention
> this in its handbooks.
>
> Anyone running SunOS 4.x-based commercial applications 'hopefully' would
> go through Oracle for migration/maintenance support rather than an
> 'independent' FOSS-related project due to technical resource demands and
> commitments.

A bit of a datapoint from the "real" world.  I am sure others can chime in
and perhaps tell me that other corporations are doing very different
things or perhaps the same mindset is everywhere.

I just spent the weekend in a datacenter for an auto manufacturing
company. One of the "big three" and I'll leave it at that. They are
running a pile of Sun Sparc servers ( with amazing stability of course )
and they refuse to even discuss Solaris on x86 at all. Period. They have
entirely too much software that runs on Sparc and it has been that way for
well over a decade. Far longer actually. I installed some of that Sparc
equipment back in the 90's and it is still running as of last night. Well,
some of it is. Mostly there is a pile of newer medium range servers.

Most of the Sparc servers are medium range class machines with a pile of
smaller units used for development work and then testing before software
or any changes get implemented to the larger production servers.
Everything is closely guarded, watched over and neatly checked before it
gets to the production servers. This is the way it is and it won't change
anytime soon.

There was a recent change last year. We sat down and discussed an upgrade
to Solaris 9 for all of the servers. They want to retain a few on Solaris
8 for legacy reasons and to ensure that they have a comparison point if
any issues arise. It has taken five years to get them to move to Solaris 9
and I applied the most recent kernel patch for Solaris 9 on a few servers
Saturday night.

Solaris 10 is being looked at. So is RHEL 5 of course but everytime that
topic is raised it gets shot down because it would cost way too much money
to port the software and test it on a whole new architecture and OS
platform. They will stay with UNIX ( Solaris ) until someone kills UNIX.
Some of the higher management is looking at the way Sun nearly killed
Solaris entirely and totally screwed up trust levels. This is why there
are zero Niagara servers in the datacenter. No one would trust that Sun
would be around or that the OS would run smoothly when money was running
out in the process.

I'm not too sure how long it took for Linux to get from being a toy in a
basement up to a trusted platform in a datacenter but the folks that wear
both a belt and suspenders on their pants refuse to look at anything less
than five years old. That means Solaris 10 is being "looked at". A test
server ( a v890 and some fibre ) is being set aside as well as some money
for a test project. No one cares the Sol 9 is EOL real soon now. It works
solid as a rock. So does Solaris 8. So will Solaris 10. I think that
servers which run a distro based on Illumos will probably be a reasonable
thing to "look at" for testing purposes somewhere in the year 2017 or so.

I'm not too sure what the target audience for this project is. I have
everything from Fedora and Debian 5 to Solaris 8 running in my own
personal datacenter and I have a need for all of it. I even have a Solaris
2.5.1 x86 server. Perhaps I am a target user for *whatever* distro comes
out of this. My real interest, however, stay with the stuff which the real
world wants and uses. That world has a really really long slow upgrade
path and Solaris was ( and will be again ) a great solution in that world.

Oh, last bit of my experience from all of this last year, no one at the
datacenter will even suggest that they jump on *anything* released by
Oracle related to Solaris or Sparc. No one trusts the long term vision yet
and no one knows if the transition from Sun to Oracle will be a good one
yet. That, I think, is just a healthy level of corporate paranoia.

Also, it is good to see you around Ken.

-- 
Dennis Clarke  2010 Member of the last OpenSolaris Governance Board
dclarke at opensolaris.ca  <- Email related to the open source Solaris
dclarke at blastwave.org   <- Email related to open source for Solaris

ps: they use star ( not tar ) to move entire filesystems around across the
brocade switches. It seems to be faster then anything else and it can be
totally trusted. I introduced that into their admin and batch scripts five
or six years ago. Just a datapoint.