[2275] in testers
Re: sun4 7.6F: $bindir and @sys on solaris
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Thu Jul 29 14:49:33 1993
To: John Carr <jfc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>, sparc@MIT.EDU, testers@MIT.EDU,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 29 Jul 93 07:01:41 -0400.
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 14:49:03 EDT
From: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
> 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).
Define "supported" OS? The world does not revolve around "athena" and
there are plenty of Sun4's around campus running SunOS 4. I wasn't
around in 1987, so I don't know what happened, but from the resuduals
that were around in 1989 when I arrived (and are still around) there
is a directory /usr/lib/X11, /usr/bin/X11. etc!
But hey, I thought they dropped support for X10? Well, they did, but
for a while (I'm guessing here) there were both X10 and X11, and hense
they needed to have different clients to talk the two different
protocols, which means they needed to have different binaries for both
X10 and X11, which resulted in different binary directories and naming
schemes for both X10 and X11!
Thank you, John. You just proved my point. While both X10 and X11
are "The X Window System", they are incompatible, so you needed
different binaries in different directories to be around to use them
both, which required two different directory-names. Well, the same
thing goes for the Sun machine. You have SunOS 4 and SunOS 5, both
co-existing, and both requiring different binaries. As such, you
should have different names (ala X10 vs. X11) for them, so you can do
this.
If the directory had been called "X", instead of "X11", you would have
been shooting yourself in the foot. And while you don't see X10
directories around campus, or anywhere for that matter, I'm almost
positive that they did exist at some point, and again, you would have
shot yourself in the foot by not allowing yourself the capability to
expand!
So, maybe SunOS4 is a lame duck (I doubt it, since even SMCC decided
to back down on their "solaris is the catch-all OS" and decied to
support SunOS 4 on the Classic and LX), but it is a predominent
machine around in labs around MIT, and its shooting yourself in the
foot to not allow both OS's to co-exist!
-derek
