From: Justin Mason (jm at domain netnoteinc.com)
Date: Wed 04 Aug 1999 - 12:02:01 IST
Brian Scanlan said:
> Well. They don't feel they need to add bits onto their OS needlessly,
> most vendors like supporting everything they ship, having to support
> PERL / gcc isn't too practical. Do they think it's a bad idea? Hell no,
> Sun distribute things like gzip where it's needed, just won't
> have it in their core distribution.
> Should a commercial OS be ready-made for the generic unix user out
> of the box? It doesn't matter, they should be well capable (and relish ;) )
> setting up a box for themselves...
No way!
Life is WAY too short. It may be fun building all these things the first
few times, but after that it tires very quickly.
That's why I run Linux, 'cos life is too short to have to shell out $$$
for a commercial UNIX and then have to build everything *useful* from
scratch. I did enough of that in the old days, and believe it or not it
was worse before autoconf; I actually had to *port* perl4 to SINIX (which
was possibly the worst UNIX I've ever used).
What SCO did (eventually) was to provide a CD ("Skunkware" IIRC), with
built binaries of most of the useful free stuff (GNU tools, perl, less,
etc.) on it. That was quite a good way of getting around the "x is
supported, y is not" problem -- if you had the nous to get the CD mounted,
and run "cp -r /cdrom/whatever /usr/local/bin", then presumably you could
cop on to the idea that the software was not officially supported by SCO.
Pity SCO was such a crappy UNIX :(
--j.
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