[FFmpeg-devel] Fixing configure on Solaris

Roman Shaposhnick rvs
Thu Aug 9 23:47:47 CEST 2007


On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 10:30 +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 09:08:37AM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> > >   Oh, don't get me wrong -- its not like it is broken on Solaris or 
> > > anything. A fully POSIX compliant grep is available from /usr/xpg4/bin.
> > > This was more a question of default behavior I guess. 
> > 
> > Then the question is, why are the proper tools hidden away in
> > /usr/xpg4/bin with the broken ones still in /bin?
> 
> Yes, why does Solaris still have broken defaults like this?  It's not
> like they haven't had more than a decade to fix this.
> 
> Roman, please grab the largest cluebat you find lying around and start
> smacking the people in the cubicles around you.

   It's not that simple: the older grep conflicts with the newer one
and the problem with that is: the very same folks who still use
/bin/grep the way it was conceived in 80s are exactly the ones who
pay Sun big bucks for not breaking their scripts. 

  Now, that, of course is a poor excuse for NOT having a system that
is flexible enough to ask anybody installing a simple question: 
"Are you an old geezer? [Yes/No]" and have "No" as the default ;-)

Thanks,
Roman.

P.S. What's interesting is that I might be put in a position to
directly influence that in Solaris organization. There's this
project Indiana led by Ian Murdock (of Debian fame) which is
supposed to be addressing exactly that. Now, my chunk will be
figuring out how to make the system flexible enough to be configured
out of individual pieces. That plus who would it be possible to
cut the middleman out of packaging software and let developers
publish their stuff directly. Sort of like building a YouTube
for OpenSource so that later any user can subscribe to one 
of the YouTube channels of even define his own. The current model
of Linux distribution seems to be: stop the world/build the world 
and as Debian proved once and for all such a megafrozen approach
never works. Anyway, what I currently have in mind is very similar
to what was proposed by Tuomov (of Ion fame):
    http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2007/07/16/T22_41_22/
    http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2007/03/03/T19_15_26/
But if you guys have any ideas or pet peeves along these lines,
do send me an email.

Corporate kool-aid aside, if the team I'm part of is going to be
at least somewhat successful in closing the gap between what
software gets developed and what software gets published by distributors
I might as well switch to Solaris 100%.





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