On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Gary Mills wrote: > My understanding was that products installed in /usr/sfw were supported and > maintained > by Sun, similarly to products in /usr. Installed software will always be out > of date to some > extent. That's not a good reason to dispense with it all and to expect the > sysadmin to > replace it all with newer releases. Only madness and pain lie in that > direction.
Software under /usr/sfw is not supported by Sun in the same way that software under /usr is supported. One reason is that Sun did not write it. Sun does fix security related issues. > Installed software products should be visible and available to users. > Otherwise they > won't even know that it's there. Why go to all the trouble of delivering it > when it won't > be used? Defaults are all-important for the user experience. Yes, a GUI > mechanism to > modify user PATH settings would be a good thing, but the initial setting > should still be to > include all possible collections. Having alternative PATH personalities is > fine. Having no > compilers in the PATH is not. I agree that defaults are important. When it comes to environment variables, it is much easier to add and extend rather than to remove or shorten. I have /usr/xpg4/bin in my path prior to /usr/bin. Many people would not appreciate my choice if it was imposed on others. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
