Joseph Kowalski <jek3 at sun.com> wrote:
> Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > You forget the most important result from the ARC discussion:
> >
> > If there is a name collision the cannot be resolved, the name cannot be used
> > in /usr/bin.
> >
> > Current Solaris express is in conflict with ARC decisions.
> >
> > J?rg
> >
> Seriously: Could you cite the precedent for this assertion?
>
> Aside: I'm more than amused that historically the use of fully qualified
> paths and lengthy PATH settings was the norm for Unix and Solaris. Then
BSD-4.2 even introduced a name conflict (2 different "mail" programs) that
was solved via your PATH. But nearly 30 years ago, things have been much
simpler than today.
We had a long ARC discussion when the first /usr/sfw/bin -> /usr/bin/ request
came out and I wrote some text that explains expected problems from moving
too much sw to /usr/bin. Several people that obviously did not grok the
problem replied fast but there have been a few replies that looked as if my
message was understood.
At that time it was obvious to me that there is an agreement on only putting
non-critical names into /usr/bin because this is the only way to allow people
to control their envionment via PATH.
/usr/bin/ on Solaris is a SVR4 dominated generic program store. Everything that
is neither SVR4 nor generic needs to be in different directories unless you
like to bnreak usability. My understanding of the ARC is that ARC is responsible
for preventing problems. In out current case, a problem has been introduced
by ingonring basic rules.
> came Linux, which seems to want to place everything into a single
> directory, because they liked it. It seems that many people prefer this
> in the interest if EOU. The cost of better EOU is often less available
> choices. Solaris has been slowly evolving to this model. Tell me again
> how the OSS world is the poster boy for resolving conflicts...
I am not sure if you know that the Solaris users that survived the Sun crisis
(which started around 1997) stayed with Solaris _because_ Solaris was well
planned and did not suffer from the "Linux probllems" that now start to swamp
Solaris too. If we like to keep these users, we cannot blindly follow mikstakes
that have been introduced on Linux.
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
