Re: [TUHS] Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap

I kind of differ here, I know I'm throwing fat into the fire but.... I had to use Solaris at uni when I started my degree 10yrs ago. It was at Melbourne University which DID have a very good computer science programme, you had to learn lots of low-level stuff like C and basic Unix programming, etc. I also used to tutor, and I remember I taught a course about MIPS assembly language using an emulator, which I believe all CS majors had to do. Obviously there was plenty of high-level stuff too (I taught a course on SQL relational algebra and so on), but what I remember is you had to learn Solaris in first year, and you had to basically know your way around the system, I recall there was a course that included a shell programming component too. Well much as I completely agree that graduates should be taught C and Unix, I found Solaris to be a pretty bad platform. I guess the core of my dissatisfaction stems from it being different to Linux, and so I suppose Solaris religious people are going to say "GNU is an ABOMINATION it should NEVER HAVE INTRODUCED LONG COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS and ALL THE TOOLS CONTAIN USELESS FEATURES" and so on... and they are right... but nevertheless I found it much less useable and I felt a lot of the tools had rough edges, as well as changing "mkdir --parents" into "mkdir -p" you had to account for different behaviour which was in most cases more naive. So, because of this the sysadmins had installed a whole boatload of GNU tools into places like /opt/gcc-(VERSION) or /opt/coreutils-(VERSION), and if you had to use a specific feature of say, "ls" or "find" or "sort" that wasn't in the Solaris tool, you had to exhaustively list the long pathname to the GNU tool in your script. The sysadmins did this kind of piecemeal in the system's scripts like .profile and the result was basically a total mess, I don't know how you would have explained all this to a naive student. Not to mention that the directory structure of the student servers had involved into a huge mess over a decade or more with lots of stuff installed in weird places that was referred to in the course material that the teachers had developed, i.e. our IP investment relied totally on this strange Solaris installation. I gather that the coursework has been significantly dumbed down now with the introduction of the so-called "Melbourne Model", it was very controversial at the time, but basically means you learn only dumbed down stuff at undergraduate level, and to get a real degree you have to do a Masters at least. I believe the Solaris student servers are still running but I don't think the coursework uses them anymore, it's all Python- and web-based now. When my sister did the course recently all her assignments were done by logging into a website and running a Python-based IDE via the website which would run her Python scripts and show her the results right there in the browser. Hmm. So I digress but anyway, I would have taken the opportunity to change all the coursework to refer to a Linux student server with all the normal tools installed in the expected places. I always found the Solaris system to be pretty much like stepping back in time. And I do not really understand why corporations would want to run Solaris when Linux is vastly more developed. I guess maybe they have a big investment in Solaris based tools and networks (perhaps stuff like Sun Grid Engine), but I would think it would be easier to port all this to Linux than to continue bashing one's head against a brick wall in trying to get this outdated and proprietary system to become modern. Much as I love BSD I feel that much the same argument applies to FreeBSD as well, it will simply never be as developed/mature as Linux. cheers, Nick On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 1:40 AM, Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote: