Notices by Alan Coopersmith (alanc@fosstodon.org)

@awb the man page sources are in XML now, using a customized DocBook DTD, much like the DTD used with SGML, from which we generate nroff, html, & PDF output, but only the nroff output is shipped with the OS now. We do the XML->nroff conversion once at build time, instead of every time a user runs the man command as was done in the SGML days.

Answerbook is gone now, replaced by a web browser and https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris/oracle-solaris/ (and docs.sun.com before that).

@awb right - the original plan was to create a curses gui more like GNU info than "nroff | more" for display of the SGML man pages allowing for following links & other advanced features, but it was never completed. All that ever shipped was a pipeline to convert SGML to nroff to view the pages the traditional way when you ran the man command.

The SGML support was removed from the man command in Solaris 11.4 after we finished the SGML to XML conversion for all the man page sources.

@awb the SysV shuffling annoyed me as well when packaging FOSS for Solaris and we'd have to shuffle their man pages to fit, and when I had to implement support for it during the conversion of X11R7 from Imake to automake. So when I became tech lead for Solaris 12 (later renamed 11.4) I decided we'd undo it:
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/normalizing-man-page-section-numbers-in-solaris-114

@ytc1 @SolarisDiaspora the DTrace source code was released at the same time, as @bcantrill described in his blog back then: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2005/01/25/solaris-10-revealed/ - while the rest of the ON source came later in June of that year.

And yeah, January 31 was when Solaris 10 FCS went up for download, though the press release didn't go out until the next day: https://web.archive.org/web/20050212152357/http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-02/sunflash.20050201.6.html

@mherrb I admit being rather surprised to recently get bug reports from people building Xorg with IPv6 intentionally disabled.

#OracleSolaris 11.4.75 adds GCC 14 to the set of available packages. Users of the C and C++ compilers may notice that GCC 14 has raised a number of issues from warnings to errors, which may impact your builds. See https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/changes.html for more information on the changes in this generation of the GNU family of compilers, and https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/porting_to.html for information on changes you may need to make to code and/or compiler flags in order to build it with GCC 14.

The pgrep and pkill commands in #OracleSolaris 11.4.75 also grew two new options for selecting which processes to match:
-r pidlist limits matches to processes with the listed pids at the root of their process trees.
-Z (capital Z) limits matches to processes in the same zone (i.e. also in the global zone, since only in the global zone can you see processes from other zones).

@lanodan heh, though even when everything's working, the way the Oracle blog pages load the content through Javascript doesn't seem to play well with the Wayback Machine. Hopefully things improve next year when they migrate the blog site to a new backend.

Today we've released #OracleSolaris 11.4.75, our quarterly feature update. The announcement is at https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru75 and lists the new features and software upgrades included.

In #OracleSolaris 11.4.75, the zfs mount and unmount subcommands now support a new -r option to recursively mount or unmount a specified #ZFS filesystem tree - for instance "zfs unmount -r /export/home" to unmount all home directories. Both commands also now take multiple arguments to mount or unmount, whether or not -r is specified.

Reading https://mastodon.social/@mboelen/113509939952156464 makes me glad that we've always had a good list of privileges (the Solaris equivalent to Linux capabilities) in the privileges(7) man page:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E88353_01/html/E37853/privileges-7.html
though I did spend a fair amount of time a couple of years back going through the rest of the #OracleSolaris man pages to make sure they correctly listed the required privileges for various system calls and commands.

@mupuf @sima right - if the compiler didn’t print any error messages it’s clearly error-free. Let me just add a few more -Wno-error… flags to CFLAGS…

@jschauma two ways to suggest that others add it:

1) mail the https://www.openwall.com/lists/libc-coord/ mailing list - many libc maintainers are found here. for a variety of Linux & Unix libc implementations.

2) suggest it to the Austin Group for a future POSIX version - either via email or bug report (see https://www.opengroup.org/austin/ ) - though they may want to see some evidence that software is actually calling it first, and I don't see any that does yet.

@nabijaczleweli I don't know about other systems, but on Solaris, Sun originally shipped Solaris 2.0 without a ranlib command, and later added a shell script that only had "exit 0" to deal with complaints about breaking builds of libraries that still called it.

@thesamesam @amonakov @vegard unfortunately, while testing a patch to assume malloc(0) can return NULL in any case, I've hit errors from gcc 14 seemingly thinking our malloc macros limit the array bounds to be either 0 or 1:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/blob/86e71472bc826ac5c850e200cb3820485b5689cf/include/X11/Xlibint.h#L449-461

@jann probably the safest fix is to find and fix all the code in X11 that assumes malloc(0) returns a valid pointer, such as https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/commit/86e71472bc826ac5c850e200cb3820485b5689cf and gcc's -Walloc-zero warnings may help there, but X11 is large and full of cruft.

@jann this is true, as is the concern that LD_PRELOADing a different malloc implementation is risky, but X11 has gotten away with it for almost 20 years now. (For the twenty years before that, it was hardcoded per-platform in the Imake config files.)

I believe it's mostly an optimization to not have to use a malloc wrapper macro that does (size == 0 ? 1 : size) to the size argument everywhere, and that level of micro-optimization may be pointless now compared to 40 years ago.

So much fun when clang optimizes out your autoconf checks:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/macros/-/issues/4

Fans of Sun & another SciFi franchise might be sad that the day they celebrate their fandom by saying "May the Forth be with you" doesn't fall in #Suntember, but they may be more disappointed after watching Han Sunlo and Wabi-Wan Kenobi battle Darth Gater in https://vimeo.com/176798587 - which appears to be pasted together from old Flash Gordon footage, instead of filming new footage of #SunMicrosystems execs and Hollywood actors like Sun Trek was. And they couldn't even fit in Luke Stackwalker?

So if September 8 is Star Trek Day, then #Suntember 8 must be Sun Trek Day, right? https://vimeo.com/173781517