Loading free software on Suns

Posted Nov 19, 2005 3:09 UTC (Sat) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

On Solaris I could never remember whether it was the stuff in /usr/bin, /usr/ccs/bin or /usr/ucb/bin or /usr/sys5/bin that should never, *ever* be used, because it was buggy in some subtle and pervasive way--instead, the stuff that immediately and obviously segfaulted or aborted should be used, because at least that stuff produced *correct* output when it worked. I think it might have actually been dependent on whether it was SunOS 4 (aka Solaris 1) or Solaris 2 (aka SunOS 5) or...

I do remember that the machines were unusable until I had replaced almost everything in /usr/bin with GNU tools--and then it was usable, but don't expect *everything* to work. I also remember that the system would explode if I tried to actually replace the stuff in /usr/bin with GNU tools. I spent much of my time making sure that the environment had $PATH a) defined in all cases (X login, ssh, telnet, rsh, rexec, ...), and b) never contained /usr/bin. It would have been much easier if I could just nuke /usr/bin or replace it with *maintained* software, without breaking all the applications on the machine.

Still...from what little I do remember, out-of-box HP/UX is much, much worse. It's like a time capsule from 1985. Segfaulting, POSIX-violating, utterly unusable, broken libc functions--code that could have no legitimate users since it could do nothing other than "kill(getpid(),SIGSEGV)"--were not fixed after several years and major HP/UX releases, despite the existence of HP patches to several of those major releases to resolve these problems. HP seemed to distribute new features bundled on the OS install disc, but every bug found in the last two decades was distributed as a patch. It was like they were afraid of changing their own binaries or something.