https://blog.dshr.org/2024/07/x-window-system-at-40.html - David Rosenthal remembers his early work at Sun on NeWS and porting X to Sun workstations, and explains why he thinks X11 won out over NeWS, and why Wayland is now displacing X11.
@stf@adulau fortunately, the POSIX standard is jointly developed with The Open Group, who publishes their version online for free, and have said the new release should be available on their website next month, so unless you need the version with the IEEE logo/legal text you won’t have to pay $700 for that one.
@jperkin@ptribble fortunately, Solaris 11.4 has made both _REENTRANT & _XOPEN_SOURCE=700 the default, so you don't need to define them any more, given all the pain caused on older OS versions.
@jperkin@ptribble yeah, you have to define __EXTENSIONS__ if you define _XOPEN_SOURCE to avoid breaking everything that depends on some function outside what the specified standard included. The change in the 11.4 headers to make the default the latest standard without specifying _XOPEN_SOURCE avoided that pitfall.
(The copy in Oracle's bug database, migrated from Sun's bug database, still shows the correct attribution, but that's not visible externally. The external copy from the OpenSolaris bug database at https://illumos.org/opensolaris/bugdb/bug.html#!4794472 also strips attribution info.)
I gave a presentation this morning on how we're doing on making Solaris ready for Y2038, and made my usual joke about how since I turn 65 in 2038, I'll be set up for a nice consulting gig when I retire, helping everyone who waited until the last minute to handle it.
This afternoon I remembered I'd be able to claim over 35 years experience with the Y2038 problem by then, thanks to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101538 but unfortunately the bug gateway it was filed through stripped the info showing I filed it.
@vab@ptribble it's an unintended fallout of our moving all the binaries from /usr/ccs/bin to /usr/bin and making /usr/ccs/bin a symlink to /usr/bin - we can't formulate a $PATH that finds Solaris strip ahead of GNU strip, but all the other GNU commands ahead of the Solaris equivalents.
@vab@ptribble it's intentional, not a bug. It was removed because GNU strip often corrupts Solaris binaries, and many times when we build other FOSS we set /usr/gnu/bin first in the path (because they expect GNU grep,msgfmt, xgettext, etc. when building), and would then get bad binaries when they called strip and found GNU strip instead of Solaris strip.
The autofs SMF service in #OracleSolaris 11.4.69 has added support for reloading automount maps on a periodic basis, so when you update the map on your LDAP server you don't need to manually run automount on all the clients to get the new maps. You can also run "svcadm refresh" now to force a manual reload.
In #OracleSolaris 11.4.69, the default/etc/ssh/sshd_config file has added "Include /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*.conf" so you can just drop new config fragments in that directory via IPS/ansible/puppet/etc. instead of having to edit the existing configs. The equivalent was also done for the ssh_config file, if you need to do things like enable old algorithms to ssh to hosts running older ssh versions.
The ps command in #OracleSolaris 11.4.69 now accepts the -I flag to display the start time ("STIME") column in an ISO 8601 format. Alternatively, the sitime keyword can be passed to the -o option to specify a start time in an ISO 8601 format.
Nice, since the #Solaris <rpc/auth.h> declares user2netname() as taking a 'char [MAXNETNAMELEN + 1]' argument, gcc 13 complains if you pass a 'char [MAXNETNAMELEN]' to it:
When Casper was designing the rough equivalent in #Solaris, the least privilege system, he tried to prevent this. For instance, PRIV_FILE_DAC_WRITE won’t let you write to a file owned by UID 0 unless your euid is 0 or you already have all privileges (equivalent to root access). https://mastodon.social/@vegard/112365131001894332
Solaris Engineer at Sun^H^H^HOracle (Release management, Security, X11, GNOME); former board member of X.Org Foundation & OpenSolaris. http://pronoun.is/he