[geeks] Article: Sun's not so cheap trick doesn't work

[Alois Hammer]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:14:40 -0400, "Phil Stracchino"
<alaric at metrocast.net> said:
> 
> I find myself unable to recommend RHEL to anyone.  Red Hat has a history
> of ignoring their engineers and making boneheaded decisions that break
> functionality or create more problems than they solve.  (Three examples
> off the top of my head:  blind rpm evangelism; gcc 2.96; Red Hat's
> broken gnutls library.)

I suspect that, if I'd actually used it yet, I'd recommend Ubuntu
Server.  But I haven't.  (Time for a new VM!)

On balance, I hate RHEL notably less than Solaris for two primary
reasons:

1) If you've got an RHN account, patching is (usually) a snap.  Solaris
makes it incredibly Byzantine.  I don't even know for sure *which* of
their iteratively deprecated patch tools I'm supposed to be using right
now, and last I investigated, using anything other than a patch cluster
seemed to require X / CDE / some terrible GUI tool.  That's just all
kinds of wrong.  It shouldn't require Java, either.  Java is a plague
and an evil.  The very last doesn't-require-X patch tool I used required
Java, and required some mostly-undocumented process involving
certificate installation in the system Java store, or somesuch.  Hi,
this is Reality calling: include the necessary certs on the bloody OS
install media, thanks, in an easily-installable package, please.

1a) Updating OpenPROM should be as easy as running a one-step tool from
the CLI, and rebooting whenever you feel like it.  Or maybe EFI or even
a trad PC BIOS instead.  OpenPROM generally makes (modern) PC BIOS look
clever by comparison.  I don't *need* a Forth interpreter in my
mainboard firmware, thanks.

2) GNU userland.  It needs to be in Solaris, it needs to be updated
regularly, it needs to not require add-ons from sunfreeware, and it
needs to not require tricks like, oh, adding /usr/ucb/bin to your path. 
Or /opt/something or /usr/local/something.  Whatever the case may be. 
And it needs to include widely used tools like... let me see... bzip2. 
And, for preference, it ought to be the default.  The Solaris binaries
need to become "broken_Solaris_tar" and "underfeatured_Solaris_sed" and
so on-- I don't care how many scripts that breaks.