Gentoo/OpenSolaris

Ok. Now this could be the best thing to come out of OpenSolaris right out of the gate: Gentoo/OpenSolaris. Package management and dependency resolution is one area where Solaris is waaaaaay behind Linux and FreeBSD. To the point that building up a Solaris system with, say, a LAMP stack is _embaressingly_ time consuming, tedious, and stupid. Try it in front of one of these “new school” Linux admins (in my world “new school” means you learned on Linux, and UNIX is unknown to you) and you’ll be laughed out of the room. “It took how long to get your box up and running?! What did you did, bootstrap it by hand?!”. Don’t go there. Trust me.

There’s Blastwave. And it’s awesome. It really is. Saves me many, many hours making a Solaris box useable by our fleet of bioinformaticians. But can you imagine emerge for the ENTIRE OpenSolaris base? No more SYSV packages?! Oh my god I’m giddy with excitement at the potential!