[illumos-Developer] HEADS UP: netservices is gone

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Wed, 2010-09-22 at 00:27 -0300, Hernan Saltiel wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org>
> wrote:
>         illumos is a true fork now.  There is little point in keeping
>         around the
>         netservices utility since we ship Secure By Default now.  This
>         removal
>         was reviewed by a couple of members of the developer-council,
>         although
>         we didn't give a full review, lacking any formal process for
>         that at
>         present.
>         
>         This might be a time for us to start with some kind of
>         fast-track like
>         process, I'm not sure.
> 
> Understand your point, Garrett, but don't you consider a better way to
> wait for Solaris 11 to be on the streets to remove netservices if it's
> removed too from S11?
> Thanks, and best regards,

In a word, "no".

To elaborate further:  Solaris 11 is over a year away.  At the same
time, the existing netservices command is both buggy in implementation,
and defective in design, and serves no purpose.  I'd be filing a PSARC
request to nuke it if I were still a PSARC member.  (Maybe I am?  The
PSARC meetings all just stopped silently without any announcement.  Like
all other communication from Oracle.)

I do not think it makes sense to worry about what Solaris 11 might or
might not look like. 

We can't wait that long for one.

For another, Oracle's priorities for Solaris are quite different from
the priorities for illumos.  They basically want a boot loader for their
database and don't care about any other uses for Solaris 11.  (There are
the appliances uses of the code base, but they use an internal private
"fork" of the code base as well, so the appliances are irrelevant for
our purpose.)  The community wants and needs a general purpose operating
system. 

The biggest favor Oracle could have done for us was to shut off the tap
-- it has given us the freedom to diverge and innovate independently,
and I intend fully to capitalize on this.

Some hoped for OpenSolaris to be a better Linux than Linux. 

I hope for illumos to be a better Solaris than Solaris. :-)

The removal of this piece of ancient and useless software is just one
small step on that path.

	- Garrett
> 
> HeCSa.
> 
> 
>  
>         
>                - Garrett
>         
>         
>         On Tue, 2010-09-21 at 16:51 +0400, Alexander Eremin wrote:
>         > 2010/9/21 Joerg Schilling
>         <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de>:
>         > > Alexander Eremin <alexander.r.eremin at gmail.com> wrote:
>         > >
>         > >> >> http://www.illumos.org/issues/160
>         > >> >>
>         > >> >> netservices has been removed.
>         > >> >
>         > >> > What is the reason for giving up compatibility with
>         Oracle Solaris?
>         > >> >
>         > >> Hi Joerg,
>         > >> This utility is marked as obsolete in netservices(1M).
>         > >
>         > > It may be called obsolete, but it was not removed by
>         Oracle.
>         > >
>         > > Jörg
>         > >
>         > > --
>         > >  EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg
>         Schilling D-13353 Berlin
>         > >       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)
>         > >       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
>         http://schily.blogspot.com/
>         > >  URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/
>         ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
>         > >
>         > Well, if I'll see it in Solaris 11, I'll be disappointed )
>         >
>         > Alex
>         >
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> 
> -- 
> HeCSa