Re: [tbox-l] looking for Python 2.6 on AIX

[Reza A. <ar...@au...>]

On 16 Jun 2009, 01:56PM CDT, Bryan Henderson <hb...@us...> wrote:
>                     I saw the toolbox come on the scene ca 2002 as part of 
> an IBM initiative to tap the new Linux market.  It was called the AIX 
> Toolbox for Linux Applications for POWER Systems and connected with a 
> product branded AIX/L.  As I understand the marketing pitch, the idea was 
> for people to buy AIX and use it to develop applications to be run on 
> Linux systems.  (The answer to the obvious question -- why not just 
> develop on Linux -- was that AIX is more reliable and has better technical 
> support and bug fixing than available Linux products).  But _I_ just 
> called it the "GNU upgrade for AIX," since my AIX system is far more 
> serviceable with GNU ls, make, etc. instead of the ones that are part of 
> AIX.

Absolutely right, you are.  Also vice versa; develop software on Linux and 
scale it up to a large AIX system.

My description was a little colored by what ended up happening.  You'd be 
surprised how many people there are, even within IBM, who despite all the 
"as-is" verbiage in the Toolbox, build their software on top of some package 
and then expect us to support it as we do the kernel or part of AIX proper.
You quickly find the culture clash between "pampered IBM customer" and
"open source do-it-yourself'er".

This becomes much more of an issue given the current frozen situation.
Important things (including basic user satisfaction) now depend on Toolbox 
software, but updates have been brought to a crawl, and there is no reasonable 
way to maintain open source you can't update.  Just try opening a bugzilla 
bug on something 5 years old.  

> I don't know to what extent IBM just gathered ports from other places, but 
> it was always my impression that IBM did a massive porting effort itself 
> to create a complete set of tools that worked on its product.

We usually started with a spec file from an RPM-based distro and took it 
from there.  

>            Are there people who would use AIX instead of Linux if they 
> could easily get all the current applications?

I would say yes, providing you remove the words "instead of Linux".


-- 
Reza Arbab
ar...@au...