Version inflation (was: Red Hat's Bluecurve (was: ...))

Paul Iadonisi pri.nhlug at iadonisi.to
Mon Oct 7 21:06:51 EDT 2002


On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 20:36, John Abreau wrote:
> "Matthew J. Brodeur" <mbrodeur at NextTime.com> writes:
> 
> >    The important question is what will they call Solaris after SunOS bumps
> > to 6.x?
> 
> The move from SunOS 4.x to SunOS 5.x was the switch from a BSD system 
> to a SYSV system. So what fundamental architectural change would justify 
> a switch from 5.x to 6.x? A new kernel based on Linux, or Mach, or Hurd?
> I haven't heard of any such plans from Sun.

  Well, unless Sun plans on having 'uname -r' return 5.99 or some such
nonsense, there is little choice.  And six probably isn't the best
choice, either, as I have heard people refer to SunOS 5.6 (Solaris 2.6)
as Solaris 6.  Wrong, yes, but nonetheless, I can see confusion
proliferating.  It gets even more fun after that -- thanks to the
marketroids at Sun, one of the few ways to prevent further confusion is
to skip SunOS 6, SunOS 7, SunOS 8, and SunOS 9 (as returned from 'uname
-r') and jump right to SunOS 10 and finally synchronize with the
marketing name as Solaris 10.
  I griped about this right before the release of Solaris 7 (aka SunOS
5.7).  That release was truly Sun's last chance to sensibly synchronize
the engineering name and version with the marketing name and version. 
Well, not the last chance, but it was right to skip Solaris 3 - 6, to
avoid the inevitable confusion with SunOS 5.3 - SunOS 5.6.  Because of
the complete failure (from a external observation, anyhow) of marketing
and engineering to communicate (gee, fancy that, like that's unusual
;-)), Sun passed up an opportunity to jump right to `uname -sr` ==
'SunOS 7.0' && `/dev/null/marketspeak` == 'Solaris 7.0'.
  Of course, we Linuxers can't really talk about this without
acknowledging the confusion of `uname -sr' not returning 'Red Hat 8.0'
on Red Hat 8.0 and instead returning 'Linux 2.4.18-14'. ;-)  Eh...such
is our version muddied lives.
  Shall we resurrect the uname/lsb_release flamewar just for more fun?!

  Overall, the best response so far has got to be Kevin Clark's response
to Matt's question above:

On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 17:37, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> 
> "Matthew J. Brodeur" <mbrodeur at nexttime.com> writes:
> 
> >    The important question is what will they call Solaris after SunOS
bumps 
> > to 6.x?
> 
> Linux?  (-:

  ROTFLOL!

  Thanks, Kevin!

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets




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