From: brossard@siisun.epfl.ch (Alain Brossard EPFL-SIC/SII)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Solaris 1.1 vs. Solaris 2.0 (BSD vs AT&T)
Date: 15 Nov 92 19:43:54 GMT
Reply-To: brossard@sic.epfl.ch
Followup-To: comp.unix.solaris
Organization: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

In article <VIXIE.92Nov14194825@cognition.pa.dec.com>, vixie@pa.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) writes:
|> It has been a long time since I posted a semi-drunken flame to usenet.
|> 
|> # There are a lot of reasons to unify the UNIX world under one roof.  You
|> # may prefer BSD over SysV, but let's face facts -> BSD is dead.  BSD is
|> # the property of UC California, Berkeley, and they are closing it down.
|> # The BSD offices are slowly getting ready to close, and UC has announced
|> # that it does not feel that the University should be functioning as a 
|> # source code house.  So, without someone to carry that torch, BSD will
|> # slowly die.  
|> 
|> You mean I'll be back to the 14-character file name limit soon?  Or that
|> I'll have to convert all my code from sockets to STREAMS?  Or that I'll
|> have to run a 200-kilobyte shell script to add accounts to my computer
|> soon?  Or that I'll have to punt X Windows in favor of a DMD5620 or VT100?
|> Or that I'll have to log into ksh or sh since will be removed from my disk?

   What are you raving about???   I thought you knew better than spout
nonsense like this.  Of course if you compare the early days of SV to
the most modern BSD, you can find problems but have a look at SVR4 before
posting next time!!!

   I use Solaris 2.x and:
	- no 14 characters limit in file names, instead it even accepts
	  full ISO-Latin-1 file names, try that with csh and BSD!  (Yes
	  the csh that comes with SVR4 understands 8 bits chars correctly!)
	  True, Solaris 2.x doesn't support the SV file system, but since
	  SVR4 supports the BSD FFS your argument is still bogus.  Beside
	  I would be surprised if that limit still existed under the System V
	  file system.
	- Sockets code runs just fine under SVR4 and will continue to do so
	- Adding a new user account has never been automated under BSD!
	  while under Solaris 2.1, there is a nice admin tool to do this.
	- As for DMD5620 (?) vs VT100, check SVR4, it comes with X11
	- Csh is certainly part of SVR4, but personnaly I will surely give
	  a look at ksh after all the good I've heard about it.  Beside
	  I'm sick of all the bugs of csh, ever tried to write a script
	  in csh?  I bet you always use sh to do so, so is BSD always
	  better than AT&T?

|> Face it, dude, AT&T doesn't know UNIX from a hole in their ass.  USL is
|> even less clueful.  System V UNIX is dead.  The market opened their eyes
|> and told them "you can't possibly be serious!" and they adopted BSD as 
|> the only way to keep selling licenses.  POSIX won the interface battle,
|> not SVID.  BSD won the users over.  If you think a new user would take
|> System V.[01234] seriously as a competitor to Windows/NT or BSD, you are
|> totally out of your freaking mind.

   You seem to be way out of touch with reality.  The only thing user
cares in the battle of BSD vs AT&T is their shell and assorted windowing.
Since these stays the same under SVR4...   True, a few program have
changed, this is the price to pay to have a standard.  As for why the
BSD options in some programs have lost out to SVR3 options, look at the
market place and see who has the most machines and look at what POSIX
says.
   You seem to think POSIX went all the way to the side of BSD when
it had to choose between the two systems, go back and take a better look!
   As for the choice a new user would make, it certainly won't be BSD.
After all, who sells BSD systems these days, what is the market share?

    As for administrators, I'm one, Solaris 2.1 certainly seems a huge
step in the right direction:

	NIS+, software packaging, printer handling (yes it is different,
but much more powerful and flexible), user handling, OS installation, etc.

    It seems to me that those who whine the most about the good old
days of BSD should be the ones at the forefront of technology.  Check
out the Multi-threading, fully pre-emptive kernel, real-time scheduling,
symetric multi-processing available under Solaris 2.1 for example.

   And yes, I fully realize that we will have to port applications
over to the new OS.  But I think a lot of people are exagerating costs
of doing this.  After all, few kernel interfaces have changed for
most user programs and the pipeline tool should be able to flag all of
them such that porting time for medium applications should be really
short.

   As for buying new versions of software, we all had to do that when
we moved from Sun OS 3.5 to 4.0 and I don't seem to remember that being
less than the costs of doing so now, and we all survived and stayed
with Sun...

-- 

Alain Brossard, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne,
	SIC/SII, EL-Ecublens, CH-1015 Lausanne, Suisse, +41 21 693-2211
brossard@sic.epfl.ch
Xref: sparky comp.unix.solaris:341 comp.unix.bsd:9107