On Thu, 28 Feb 2008, Gary Mills wrote: > There are several places in Opensolaris where PATH and MANPATH are set. > By default, however, when I rlogin to an Nevada b81 release, I find that > PATH=/usr/bin > and MANPATH is not set at all. This is pitiful! Many people assume that > nothing else > is installed on Opensolaris; they build and install their own copies. > Surely, /usr/sfw/bin > and /usr/ccs/bin should be in the default PATH, with similar directories in > MANPATH.
If the 'man' command still finds the standard manual pages (which it does), then I think that it is good that MANPATH is not set at all since it is bad to pollute the user's default environment variable space with unnecessary environment variables. I also think that it is good that /usr/sfw/bin is not in the PATH by default since it is typically full of very outdated open source software, or software which will become outdated not long after a release. For example, on a Solaris 10 system, the version of ImageMagick available is from 2002 and the GNU m4 available is too old to be used with Autoconf. I very much wish that the rest of Solaris did not depend on anything under /usr/sfw, but I spent almost four hours last week figuring out how to avoid using a library and headers from there which were picked up due to pkg-config output. In the end I failed and had to temporarily rename a system directory so I could build my software. Likewise, I don't think that all users need to have access to software development tools. A minimal standards-compliant environment should continue to be the norm for Solaris. With 1048 commands already in /usr/bin on Solaris 10, it is already becoming a bit bloated. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
