NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/comp/sys/sun/admin/8195

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-12 | 2.4 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!rice-chex!cracraft
From: [e-mail] (Stuart Cracraft)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: avoiding Solaris
Date: 12 Nov 1992 15:22:50 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Lines: 39
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rice-chex.ai.mit.edu


After a one-month port of a simulator to the Solaris 2.0 environment,
we are seriously thinking of avoiding Solaris altogether. When you
carefully look at what can be achieved in-house when vendors don't
change out platforms from under the customer (e.g. more real work)
vs. when they do (e.g. catch-up make-work), it is very easy to
conclude that stepping into the Solaris 2.0 platform could waste
up to a man-year of one staff member's time doing porting, conversions,
learning System V unix, and so forth.

For most environments in which Sun OS 4.1.2/4.1.3 is currently running,
System V is a poor replacement, with or without a compatibility package.
These customers typically do not want a shrink-wrap capable system and
are more interested in the Berkeley environment. When they find that
System V, Release 4 requires rewriting hundreds of their shell scripts
originally written under 4.1.X, even more additional conversion time
must be budgeted.

The hypothesis offered is that Solaris 2.0 (quite apart from the
abysmal performance issues of the initial 2.0 release and the
SparcCompiler C/Linker -- resulting in seven-fold slowdowns in
engineer linking of large executables (~20mb)) is not cost-effective
for most sites that do not build shrink-wrapped software for an open
marketplace. The majority of SUN users appear to be engineers trying
to get real work done not related to a specific software product
that will eventually run on a Sparc platform. The vocal minority
of those who are working on Sparc-products must be dancing with glee
over the force-feeding of Solaris 2.0/2.1 to the rest of us.

And, although the maintenance of 4.1.X will gradually be eclipsed
by maintenance of Solaris (e.g. more telephone support, trained
staff at Sun, etc.) it is unlikely this will occur at all soon.
There will always remain a large group of SUN users who feel Berkeley
Unix were the last "good" days.

And the truly wise will set aside a machine or two to run Solaris on
for 1-2 years before effecting any major change at their site.

Stuart