On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 10:32:41AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > > Also, the change of environment is not to make usable a program that would not > be, but simply to make it the default choice or not, under its original > upstream name, the one that our users expect, read in the documentation, hear > from their colleagues and use in their scripts.
IMHO the strongest argument of Russ was that your proposed way to set the PATH variable in /etc/profile.d just does not work for all shells, specifically for dash and the frequently used csh clones which are frequently used in scientific environment. > There is an obvious selection pressure against file conflicts. The conflicts > that we encounter in Debian are the ones that does no make the program > problematic on the majority of user's systems outside the Debian world. I > think > that we already trust our maintainers to not provide a program under its > original > upstream name if it would causes system-wide side effects to make it a default > after changing the PATH. The current approach is to propose to the user to > edit > the PATH by himself, with one directory per package having a conflict. What I > propose is to group these paths per theme (corresponding to Debian Blends), > and to set it up automatically only if the user is member of the Blends > group. It > is mostly an automation of an already existing approach. So in principle I like the idea for Blends and we just discussed this previosely - but there is no *reliable* way to let it work because we do not really have control about the shell a Blend user is using. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100815174857.gf14...@an3as.eu