[geeks] Sun is developing a new LINUX desktop!!

[Mike Meredith]

On Sunday 10 November 2002 9:42 pm, Jonathan C Patschke wrote:
> How about having nicely asking the -developer- of the code to make
> his crap portable, in exchange for having it included on the next
> Solaris Software Companion?  That sounds like an insanely great idea
> to me! 

It sounds like a pretty good idea to me too.

But there's still going to be plenty of stuff that isn't so easily 
compiled. And when it's as simple as assuming that libz is around, 
there doesn't seem any harm in adding to Solaris.

This is hardly a new problem, and the various standards that Solaris 
follows are an attempt to lessen the problem. For better or worse, 
Linux is a major force in the Unix world, and making Linux software 
easier to compile under Solaris would help Solaris admins.

> But then, I've been spending my spare time over the last eight
> months porting nearly 300 software packages to IRIX, so I might be a
> bit biased towards developers getting their act together.

Is this work available anywhere ? I'm slowly rebuilding stuff on my 
Octane, and I'm not allergic to cheating :)

> making life better for anyone.  If they become LSB compliant, that
> includes API changes, moving files around (basically juggling between
> /etc, /sbin, and /usr/sbin), possibly making /sbin/sh either a
> full-blown Korn shell or bash, and lots of other silliness that just
> doesn't need to happen.

Obviously they should avoid making changes that would break Solaris 
applications and even stuff that makes Solaris less Solaris-like, but 
many if not most of the changes don't appear to be anywhere near that 
fundamental. As an example, would it really cause that much pain if 
/sbin/shutdown was a symlink to /etc/shutdown ?