[2268] in testers
Re: sun4 7.6F: $bindir and @sys on solaris
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Carr)
Thu Jul 29 07:01:58 1993
To: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
Cc: sparc@MIT.EDU, testers@MIT.EDU, bug-sparc@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Jul 1993 21:11:47 EDT."
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 07:01:41 EDT
From: John Carr <jfc@Athena.MIT.EDU>
> Now, for the second problem, the $bindir inconsistency. When
> Athena first got the Suns, it used a $bindir of "sun4" so you could
> have a "sun4bin" which contains your sun binaries. This was fine.
> But now that Athena has switched to solaris, it still kept the name
> "sun4", which is a problem!!!!
My understanding is that the original Sun OS 4 port was limited
distribution only, so backwards compatibility is not considered
important. I agree with this decision. For all of Solaris' flaws,
it is the supported OS and SunOS-Athena should be treated like X10
was back in 1987 (kill it before it grows).
