From: casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik)
Subject: Re: avoiding Solaris
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 10:43:39 GMT

cracraft@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Stuart Cracraft) writes:


>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.

So you want you applications to run under current versions of SunOS/BSDish
operating systems only? Most vendors will only offer Sys V or something
very much like Sys V. Even BSD 4.4 will be vastly different from BSD 4.3.

>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.

Why? I don't think many users are more interested in ``a BSD environment''
than a Sys V.4 environment. People will have to convert things to
run under Solaris, true. But apparently they weren't interested in
the rest of the Unix market, the vast majority of which is already Sys V.
They are probably not interested in selling their products either.

>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.

Solaris 2.0 was a ``it works, but only just'' release. If they haven't fixed
the linker in the 2.1 or won't fix it in later releases, you have reason
to complain. Performance measures in 2.0 are not really valid.

>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. 

I doubt it. The pro-Berkeley feeling is pretty much like
Political Correctness (tm). Or can you convince me to be pro-Berkeley
(I was once) on solid reasoning?

>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.

If you have a current base consisting of only Suns, you will want
to have some machines running Solaris and porting software.
On these systems you judge the pros and cons of Solaris and when
you should make the move. Of course, you can't make a move without
making sure that the majority of your software works again.

Sun's gamble is probaly that switching to Solaris is less of a pain
than switching to another vendor. Other vendors sell mainly Sys V,
so it will be difficult to stay in the BSD camp. You can wait for
BSD 4.4 for the SPARC. But that will not support all Suns nor
will you be able to buy much software for it or develop
software for anything but BSD.

Casper