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Re: sparc linux/solaris binary compatibility



Hello there, erez.

Tuesday, January 04, 2000, 2:31:51 PM, you wrote:

>> esc> 2. for standarisation ( i.e. i hate to type 'ps aux' instead of 'ps -aef' and
>> esc> vice versa ...
>>
>> % echo 'set path=(/usr/ucb $path)' >> ~/.cshrc
>> % source !$
>> % rehash

esc> thanks ! I needed that ( and it fixesed also others like 'df' etc ... )

>>
>> (of course, that means you're using libbeforechrisht a lot,
>> but hey, at least you can type ps aux)

esc> say what ?

When Sun introduced Sys V-ish Solaris, it made obsolete in one fell swoop lots
of perfectly useful BSDish tools. This caused much anger in the SunOS
user community, since uncounted scripts broke ovrenight.

To solve this problem, Sun took two important steps:

1) They named the new version of their operating system Solaris 2, and
   retroactively named SunOS: Solaris 1;
2) They put a large portion of SunOS's /bin and /usr/bin in Solaris'
   /usr/ucb . To allow these to work, though, they had to be
   dynamically linked with a "new" version of libc and other libs,
   originally called libbc (for binary compatibility). Unfortunately,
   this library is not as well maintained as more modern libraries in
   Solaris 2's /lib and /usr/lib; in fact, it took a long while to fix
   very old bugs there. This in turn caused many people to rename
   libbc to lib "Before Christ".

By the way: Sun noticed that the confusion that arose from step #1 was
not enough, and that some managers in the install base world still
thought they knew what was going on. Appropriately, all versions of
Solaris 2 are also (tada!) SunOS 5 (That is, Solaris 2.4 == SunOS
5.4).

The insolent managers STILL thought they knew what was goin on, so Sun
tried another trick hoping to shake them off: Solaris 2.7 - which many
people would swear they saw - was renamed during late beta to
Solaris 7, and accordingly also SunOS 5.7 .

And this should not be read as a flame against Sun, but as an endeared
account by an impressed non-manager.

Hope this helps,
Gaal

PS: and if you've read all the way to here, you will forgive me for
the utterly off-topic flavor of this post.

-- 
believing is seeing
gaal@forum2.org
http://www.forum2.org/gaal/



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