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Installing updates is a complete trainwreck for almost every product they've ever released and that's one of the most basic tasks for a software vendor." T

Installing updates is a complete trainwreck for almost every product they've ever released and that's one of the most basic tasks for a software vendor." Then you haven't used Solaris 11, because in general, installing updates for the OS (and Java and many other things) is as simple as: pkg update Also, your generalisations about 'no cultural tradition of taking toolchain usability seriously' are simply not true, I can show you plenty of tools where clearly whoever was working on them did care about usability. With that said, I'm sure you're just venting and didn't mean what you said "literally"...

mateuszf 12y ago
Are you saying that every JDK install should come with Solaris? Or that operating systems should be built specifically to suppport java installation?
- yellowapple 12y ago
  > Or that operating systems should be built specifically to suppport java installation? Not even "specifically"; these updating woes rarely exist on platforms where you have a proper package manager (be it APT or YUM or Zypper or Pacman or Homebrew or whatever). Software devs shouldn't have to worry about writing updaters, since updating should be handled by the OS.
  - binarycrusader 12y ago
    Exactly, Solaris 11 has a "proper" package manager: Network-based repositories, SAT-solver-based dependency management, signed packages, boot environments, etc.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  In this case, every jdk install is available from the Solaris network package repository. Just like many Linux distros. Linux distributions have the same problem so I don't understand the downvotes.
jmulho 12y ago
We have a joke around here that if you get a job at Oracle out of college the first project they put you on is the Oracle Universal Installer. The thing has never worked. If you want to entertain yourself for a couple of weeks, try installing the latest version of the Oracle Database on the latest version of Oracle Linux. Oh, and try doing something "advanced" like using a non-default block size for the database. There is a little check box for that, but it doesn't work. You'll end up hand-editing a lot of Perl and Korn shell scripts and essentially running (and re-running) the whole install by hand. It's ridiculous. Once you get it running the software is amazing. Obviously they are capable of writing an installer. They just don't care.
acdha 12y ago
You're right, I have never used Solaris 11. I stopped at Solaris 10 because the TCO was too hard to justify versus Linux – the then-new updates bricking a whole shipment of servers was the final straw for us. I've used both Sun and Oracle products since the mid-90s. The only one which I can recall seeming to respect my time was DTrace and maybe ZFS. Oracle is by far worse (updates shipped as a flat ZIP file with text instructions where to install them?) but both really left the impression that they assumed my time was cheaper than them hiring a packaging engineer.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  My point was that you generalised your experience with one product to all things ever produced by either company. Generalisations are usually wrong. You claimed none of their products ever showed any care about usability. Yet, at last check, they all had fairly extensive documentation, accessibility work done to them, and clearly do many things that consider the user experience. Like I said, you're clearly venting. Consider being more constructive in your comments, or at least focusing on something specific instead of just ranting.
  - acdha 12y ago
    > My point was that you generalised your experience with one product to all things ever produced by either company. Generalisations are usually wrong. Then it's a good thing I didn't do that. I've used a number of products from both company, ranging in price from free to suites which come with 6 figure annual support contracts. > You claimed none of their products ever showed any care about usability. Yet, at last check, they all had fairly extensive documentation, accessibility work done to them, and clearly do many things that consider the user experience. Allow me to quote what I actually said: > both Sun and Oracle have no cultural tradition of taking toolchain usability seriously That's not saying that they don't do things like, say, accessibility as required to get government contracts. What I was talking about is that all of the products seemed to assume that their product was so compelling that we would be willing to invest considerable resources doing the kind of support which other vendors do as part of their job. At multiple employers, having spent 6-8 figures on Oracle database or enterprise business applications, we used to get things like critical security updates delivered as a ZIP file with instructions for where to copy files and what permissions to set them. Sure, it's not that hard to roll a pkg, rpm, etc. but why should every customer need to do that? One of Oracle's big enterprise apps broke when IE8 was released because the latest version still shipped a 5+ year-old JavaScript library which performed some illegal DOM operations which were now validated even in IE7 compatibility mode. When I called support, they arrogantly told me that they don't test Microsoft's software for them and would test after it was released (which was weeks in the past at this point). About a week later, a manager called me asking for a copy of the patch which I had mentioned developing so they could distribute it to other customers who had the same problem. During the year I spent supporting that mess, our half-million-year contract didn't once get a support engineer who fixed a problem, or could even troubleshoot it without my hand-holding them through reading the error messages and eventually entering a ticket. At every point the answer was to install the latest version or reinstall what we already had, which was a long manual process with tons of hand redundant configuration in many places (many daemons on many servers). Having documentation telling you to open an XML file here and add certain blocks of text with values matching this plist over there is extensive but is not usable. Sun wasn't as bad but they weren't well organized. Brand new V40z servers arrive with Solaris 10. The updater rendered them unbootable. Support says to try the install again, which produces the same result. Calling our sales guy says this is a known problem and they can have a systems engineer help walk us through patching a bunch of stuff by hand so the updater won't break it – great, they're supporting us but … who's paying us for the hours spent on something which would literally take 5 minutes for their QA team to reproduce? If we had thousands of them and a strong case for Solaris we might have been able to justify the time investment but it took 20 minutes to have the systems in production running Debian Linux and we spent less time on OS support over the life of hardware than trying to get a core feature to work once.
nailer 12y ago
Last time I used Solaris they didn't have proper package names. Everything was VNDRacnm where the first part was the vendor second part acronym was a minified piece of some bit of information that would have been useful if it wasn't minified.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  As I said, then you haven't used Solaris 11. For example, the vim package name is 'editor/vim'. A similar naming scheme is used for almost every package.

mateuszf 12y ago

Are you saying that every JDK install should come with Solaris? Or that operating systems should be built specifically to suppport java installation?

yellowapple 12y ago
> Or that operating systems should be built specifically to suppport java installation? Not even "specifically"; these updating woes rarely exist on platforms where you have a proper package manager (be it APT or YUM or Zypper or Pacman or Homebrew or whatever). Software devs shouldn't have to worry about writing updaters, since updating should be handled by the OS.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  Exactly, Solaris 11 has a "proper" package manager: Network-based repositories, SAT-solver-based dependency management, signed packages, boot environments, etc.
binarycrusader 12y ago
In this case, every jdk install is available from the Solaris network package repository. Just like many Linux distros. Linux distributions have the same problem so I don't understand the downvotes.

jmulho 12y ago

We have a joke around here that if you get a job at Oracle out of college the first project they put you on is the Oracle Universal Installer. The thing has never worked. If you want to entertain yourself for a couple of weeks, try installing the latest version of the Oracle Database on the latest version of Oracle Linux. Oh, and try doing something "advanced" like using a non-default block size for the database. There is a little check box for that, but it doesn't work. You'll end up hand-editing a lot of Perl and Korn shell scripts and essentially running (and re-running) the whole install by hand. It's ridiculous. Once you get it running the software is amazing. Obviously they are capable of writing an installer. They just don't care.

acdha 12y ago

You're right, I have never used Solaris 11. I stopped at Solaris 10 because the TCO was too hard to justify versus Linux – the then-new updates bricking a whole shipment of servers was the final straw for us. I've used both Sun and Oracle products since the mid-90s. The only one which I can recall seeming to respect my time was DTrace and maybe ZFS. Oracle is by far worse (updates shipped as a flat ZIP file with text instructions where to install them?) but both really left the impression that they assumed my time was cheaper than them hiring a packaging engineer.

binarycrusader 12y ago
My point was that you generalised your experience with one product to all things ever produced by either company. Generalisations are usually wrong. You claimed none of their products ever showed any care about usability. Yet, at last check, they all had fairly extensive documentation, accessibility work done to them, and clearly do many things that consider the user experience. Like I said, you're clearly venting. Consider being more constructive in your comments, or at least focusing on something specific instead of just ranting.
- acdha 12y ago
  > My point was that you generalised your experience with one product to all things ever produced by either company. Generalisations are usually wrong. Then it's a good thing I didn't do that. I've used a number of products from both company, ranging in price from free to suites which come with 6 figure annual support contracts. > You claimed none of their products ever showed any care about usability. Yet, at last check, they all had fairly extensive documentation, accessibility work done to them, and clearly do many things that consider the user experience. Allow me to quote what I actually said: > both Sun and Oracle have no cultural tradition of taking toolchain usability seriously That's not saying that they don't do things like, say, accessibility as required to get government contracts. What I was talking about is that all of the products seemed to assume that their product was so compelling that we would be willing to invest considerable resources doing the kind of support which other vendors do as part of their job. At multiple employers, having spent 6-8 figures on Oracle database or enterprise business applications, we used to get things like critical security updates delivered as a ZIP file with instructions for where to copy files and what permissions to set them. Sure, it's not that hard to roll a pkg, rpm, etc. but why should every customer need to do that? One of Oracle's big enterprise apps broke when IE8 was released because the latest version still shipped a 5+ year-old JavaScript library which performed some illegal DOM operations which were now validated even in IE7 compatibility mode. When I called support, they arrogantly told me that they don't test Microsoft's software for them and would test after it was released (which was weeks in the past at this point). About a week later, a manager called me asking for a copy of the patch which I had mentioned developing so they could distribute it to other customers who had the same problem. During the year I spent supporting that mess, our half-million-year contract didn't once get a support engineer who fixed a problem, or could even troubleshoot it without my hand-holding them through reading the error messages and eventually entering a ticket. At every point the answer was to install the latest version or reinstall what we already had, which was a long manual process with tons of hand redundant configuration in many places (many daemons on many servers). Having documentation telling you to open an XML file here and add certain blocks of text with values matching this plist over there is extensive but is not usable. Sun wasn't as bad but they weren't well organized. Brand new V40z servers arrive with Solaris 10. The updater rendered them unbootable. Support says to try the install again, which produces the same result. Calling our sales guy says this is a known problem and they can have a systems engineer help walk us through patching a bunch of stuff by hand so the updater won't break it – great, they're supporting us but … who's paying us for the hours spent on something which would literally take 5 minutes for their QA team to reproduce? If we had thousands of them and a strong case for Solaris we might have been able to justify the time investment but it took 20 minutes to have the systems in production running Debian Linux and we spent less time on OS support over the life of hardware than trying to get a core feature to work once.

nailer 12y ago

Last time I used Solaris they didn't have proper package names. Everything was VNDRacnm where the first part was the vendor second part acronym was a minified piece of some bit of information that would have been useful if it wasn't minified.

binarycrusader 12y ago
As I said, then you haven't used Solaris 11. For example, the vim package name is 'editor/vim'. A similar naming scheme is used for almost every package.