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

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Alois Hammer wrote:

> 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.

What's difficult about it?  You reboot to the firmware updater and then
reboot again.  Unless you're running Windows, this is the standard
procedure for updating most PCs, as well.

> OpenPROM generally makes (modern) PC BIOS look clever by comparison.  I
> don't *need* a Forth interpreter in my mainboard firmware, thanks.

You think you don't, until you need it.  OpenBoot has let me work around
system bugs and adapter card bugs before the vendor got updated firmware
out.  One of my older PPC Macs has so many patches (mostly to work around
the buggy firmware on the Adaptec SCSI card in it) in the OFW user space
that I ran -out- of patch space.

It's also handy if you want/need to netboot one system Right Now and don't
have the infrastructure set up.  Cram all your settings into the OpenBoot
command line, and you're off.

> 2) GNU userland.

Sucks, is overly bloated, and doesn't know which way it's going from one
week to the next.

> 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.

/usr/ucb isn't GNU; it's BSD.  The "Unix Compatibility" refers to Solaris
1 (and most of the other commercial Unix systems that were out around the
time Solaris 2 came out).

> Or /opt/something or /usr/local/something.  Whatever the case may be.

Welcome to System V.  -All- System V Unixes are like that.  If you want
BSD or Linux, you know where to find it.

> 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.

The feature you're looking for is the 'PATH' variable.  On my Solaris and
HPUX systems, 'tar' gets me GNU tar.  If you want it to be system-wide,
edit /etc/default/login.

If you don't want to run System V Unix, don't run System V Unix!  The fact
is that the GNUware junk isn't completely upwards compatible with..well,
anything.  POSIX and System V, along with the newer standards such as the
SUS and Unix 03, guarantee that scripts and software written against older
versions of the standards will almost always work with newer systems.

With most GNUware systems, you're lucky if a script written for GNU
m4/awk/sed X.Y.Z will run with X.Y.(Z+1) and you don't need to upgrade
some completely unrelated shit like iconv, gettext, or bison just to move
to X.Y.(Z+1).  Some people like that sort of thing, I guess (witness
Gentoo Linux).

Me, being the poor bastard that gets to support all that GNU garbage on a
variety of older systems (because the folks at $ork who use Linux and code
against specific versions of GNU crap need their stuff to run on HPUX, as
well), would rather see the entirety of the GNU project's source code be
lost in some sort of widespread tragic accident.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |