Thursday, April 26, 2007

Some OpenSolaris Annoyances

1) There is no -R option in most of the basic shell utilities. Yeah I know I can always download the gnu equivalent too.
2) 64 bit libraries are placed in /lib/am64. This is crappy especially when you are compiling from source and most configures would expect the libpath to end at /lib
3) Too man locations for libs and binaries. We have /usr/[bin,lib] /usr/local/[bin,lib] /opt/csw/[bin,lib] /usr/sfw/[bin,lib]. Worse most of them are not included in the path by default, we need to set them up.
4) Compilations on 64 bit systems dont generate 64bit binaries by default
5) Even the Sun Studio compilers use dumb options for default... remember stlport. Comeon guys.

Maybe we are sacrificing a lot for ensuring backward compatibility. At the end of the day we need to assure that we have a easily usable system.

Note: Binary compatility rocks but maintaining everything just doesnt seem to make sense. After all how many people use Solaris 7 binaries on Solaris 10.

No comments: