Software development is about trade-offs and apparently linux wasn't hurt as bad by the occassional ABI breakage as solaris was hurt by the "backwards compatibility above all" mindset (which ofcourse reaches way beyond the basic ABI).
I was arguing more in terms of market- and mindshare than in terms of technical merit. Yes, Solaris grew a few very strong subsystems. The problem is that your list ends very shortly after Dtrace, ZFS and Zones (which is already matched by OpenVZ anyways). Those few bright spots are simply not enough reason for most people to put up with with an OS that is otherwise firmly stuck in the 90s (horrible userland, absence of a package manager, no worthwhile mass provisioning options, etc.).
What came first, Jumpstart or Kickstart? Again, Linux is playing catch-up.
Jumpstart, Kickstart? Well, I guess they were hot in 2001, yes.
All sizable solaris deployments I know today are struggling with FAI, puppet and a lot of custom glue scriptery to enable at least a basic grasp on their deployments. JET and the ilk is just not even touching a worthwhile real-world problem.
And the userland/package manager problem is neatly addressed by Blastwave.org.
Likewise I can only scratch my head over reading blastwave and "neat" in the same sentence. Have you even used it?
I'm in fact a bit surprised it still exists because most solaris admins seem to either scoff at the idea altogether and stick with the regular pkgadd, or look for greener pastures in OpenSolaris - which wisely refrained from any attempts to re-invent apt.
Well, but as said, my initial point wasn't even about discussing implementation details in one way or another. There is no doubt solaris displays great technical excellence in some areas. Unfortunately too often these are not the areas that people in the real world care about.
Yes of course I've used it. Updated all my packages yesterday in fact, went perfectly smoothly. YMMV but all the full-time Solaris admins I know are Blastwave fans.
The point I am making it: a serious OS doesn't break backwards compatibility on an individual developer's whim, no matter how famous they are.
a serious OS doesn't break backwards compatibility on an individual developer's whim, no matter how famous they are.
Well, most people seem to like their OS a little bit less serious nowadays.
Or, more seriously, over here in the real world this is simply a non-issue for almost everybody. Binary compatibility between OS revisions was important when compile-runs would take days. Nowadays you just compile for your target platform and move on.
Software development is about trade-offs and apparently linux wasn't hurt as bad by the occassional ABI breakage as solaris was hurt by the "backwards compatibility above all" mindset (which ofcourse reaches way beyond the basic ABI).
It's all about the albatrosses.