Let me start by saying that I really don't want this to degrade into another senseless tirade of blame and criticism as a question like this usually provokes. If you don't have anything constructive to say, I'd prefer you save it for another thread. I'm trying to start a constructive discussion so people like myself understand the difficulties supporting Indiana as it goes forward.
Putting the gnu tools at the front of the default path raises the question how are we going to resolve the conflicts between tool name collisions? I really don't care that the gnu tools are available, but it also means that as Indiana upgrades add more gnu tools, the expected environment changes in unpredictable ways. Here is a couple of the potential issues I feel might be lurking in this setup: I see that "install" is there, probably for good reasons, but doesn't most gnu-based Makefiles automatically look for ginstall if needed? Why do we need the gnu df and tar command, but not the gnu ps command? I guess what I'm asking is shouldn't this be an "all or nothing" choice? Having a smattering of gnu tools that may change by the selection of "packages" installed is very scary to me. I'm trying to figure out the rationalization for the choices of tools since it may break some existing Solaris administration scripts written over the years. Suppose I have a lot of Indiana users with different preference to their default paths. How do I insure that scripts launched remotely via ssh unexpectedly end up broken because of the particular machine's choice of gnu tools? I don't want to figure out which version of what is called when I make a call to a utility from a script. Subtle differences can create huge issues. For example, the only "ps" extended format I've found in common between gnu ps and SYSV is the -L option. I hate to have to go through each utility to find the usable subset that is common among the tools so scripts work. That becomes a system administrator's nightmare. Gary -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
