Comments on: Why It’s Important to Fix the Solaris Shell

By: RedMonk Analytics: A Year in Review | ServicesANGLE

RedMonk Analytics: A Year in Review | ServicesANGLE — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:47:37 +0000

[...] that big a deal, but O’Grady was able to show the many search queries that led searchers to a post he did on that very subject. That search data helped make the case that users were unhappy with the shell and wanted [...]

By: tecosystems » Why I Love JetBlue…Again

tecosystems » Why I Love JetBlue…Again — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:39:00 +0000

[...] and in a relatively inconvenient location (for me). If nothing else, I need to keep up my “fix the shell” campaign. Unfortunately, JFK had other plans. If I didn’t have project calls this [...]

By: Nigel Smith

Nigel Smith — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 23:20:44 +0000

A fix for the solaris ‘backspace’ problem, with the current default shell can be found at this link:

http://blogs.sun.com/dmick/entry/making_backspace_be_your_default

By: tecosystems » The Solaris Google Query of the Day

tecosystems » The Solaris Google Query of the Day — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:02:02 +0000

[...] Earlier this week, I used some data from our traffic logs – courtesy of Statcounter – to make a point regarding the importance of fixing the shell. There are many such points that can be made, but there’s another one today that validates something I’ve believed for some time now but have had difficulty convincing others of. [...]

By: Michael Dolan Dot Com » Just who contributes to Linux? An in depth analysis of code commits

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 02:48:14 +0000

[...] The Linux developer community is what really keeps Linux steaming along – many vendors and many developers – it’s a train, and it’s very hard to stop a train this big. And this analysis is JUST THE KERNEL. Add in all the libraries, tooling, GUI work, packaging, and other supporting software around the kernel and the community explodes. This is why I laugh when I see “OpenSolaris this or that” from the Sun marketing machine – I took a look and 3 community developers accounted for over 50% of their “community contributions” accepted into the OpenSolaris codebase. That’s for an entire distribution – not just a kernel… I put the community contributions in quotes b/c most of the changes are corrections to comments or minor bug fixes – nothing architecturally significant or evolutionary. OpenSolaris forums are a good Solaris user forums – lots of discussions, users helping users, but very little code. Very similar to Gentoo forums but for Solaris users. Hence even 1.5 yrs later, some changes users have been demanding to make still plague the platform. These issues aren’t new, nor is it just a couple users pushing the idea, but you need developers with architecture (and code commit) control in the community to make anything happen – and generally those developers prefer vendor independence. Anyway, off my soapbox. Someone asked not long ago what my issues were… and that about covers it. [...]

By: David Comay

David Comay — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 02:35:25 +0000

Scott, I won’t commit to a date specifically on the backspace issue but we’re well aware in engineering that there are things like that or the default shell for root that needs to be fixed. We’re working on them just as fast as we can and you will see fixes in the “things should just work out of the box” area during this year.

The first place it will be addressed is is OpenSolaris and distributions that are built from that such as Solaris Express (those distros can be found at http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/)

By: Scott Lamb

Scott Lamb — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:59:22 +0000

David Comay, I’m confused by your wording. You’re among fellow engineers; please speak engineering, not marketing. Does “a positive change in this space in the coming calendar year” mean that backspace will work out of the box by 2008?

By: Christopher Mahan

Christopher Mahan — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:44:49 +0000

When my team’s unix account was set up on solaris, the first thing I asked the admins to do was set up bash as the default shell. They asked me if I was sure everybody on the team was ok with that and I replied “Absolutely”. That was 2 years ago. Nobody has mentioned ksh in all that time.

By: Roland Mainz

Roland Mainz — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 05:25:20 +0000

The issue with the Solaris shells is currently being worked on – see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ksh93-integration/

By: sogrady

sogrady — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:21:45 +0000

David: there are undoubtedly some – like yourself – that understand both the issue and its importance. i had the privilege of meeting with a bunch of the more progressive minded Solaris devs while out in CA for the analyst conf. that said, there is certainly a traditionalist type of developer that sees little if any need for the change, and is overly (IMO) concerned with the risks.

anyway, i hope you’re right: i’d love to see some movement on this soon.

Stephen: yeah, i’ve been bitten by that myself. my usual fix is just call bash to run the script, i.e. bash ./runlime.sh. that’s worked for me, but less than ideal, i agree. particularly b/c most folks won’t know to do that.