> I think that its really important that the live cd is a true subset of
> what a user would get from a full indiana (or solaris next as the case
> may be) install. From a usability perspective the closer to the finally
> installed bits the better - including default settings etc. I'd be
> strongly against delivering a gnu userland if that wasn't the default
> when the bits are finally committed to disk.

The current thinking with OpenSolaris has been to retain backwards
compatibility for commands in existing directories such as /usr/bin and
/usr/sbin and instead introduce the /usr/gnu hierarchy to contain those
commands which conflict with existing versions.  Then, a new user
coming from a GNU/Linux background will get most of what they want just
by putting /usr/gnu/bin at the front of their PATH (or at least until
more external open source has been integrated into OpenSolaris).

I think for the moment that Indiana should follow this precedent since
Indiana should replace Solaris Express and eventually find its way out
in a long-term support release such as Solaris 11^H^HNext.  And while
we definitely want to attact new users to OpenSolaris, we certainly
want to avoid creating new issues for existing users of the
technology.

Now perhaps we should be making a "switch" from the traditional
user-land being the default and instead promote /usr/gnu to that
position (/usr/sunos anyone?) but that's a discussion for another day.

In summary, I don't see an issue[1] with delivering the live CD with
both the traditional (default) user-land as well as the /usr/gnu
hierarchy.  When new users get created, perhaps an option should be
supplied to provide them with a .profile (or equivalent) that puts
/usr/gnu/* at the front of the appropriate environment variables?  Or
as I've seen suggested before, perhaps /usr/bin/bash should do this by
default anyway.

dsc

[1] Modulo the size limitations of a CD.
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