Pete Bentley wrote: > > It's a good solution for people who understand Solaris already and > know which directories they might need in their PATH, but I get the > impression this proposal is intended to create a "comfort zone" for > people coming from environments where they might expect a complete GNU > userland by default. > So update the defautl PATH to find these things, and most that don't wnat to delve into setting up PATH themselves will never know the tools live somewhere else. > However, rather than dumping it all in /usr/bin it might be better to > create a new bin directory (/usr/dustbin?) for those people which is > simply a symlink farm out to the various /usr/*/bin directories (much > the way Veritas put links from /opt/VRTS/bin/* to all their > /opt/VRTS/*/bin/* executables). > > Or this could even be achieved with package (SUNWlinuxcomfort) which > was not installed by default, and which built out a symlink farm from > /usr/bin ... That seems link an ugly solution to me though. > Maybe. Maybe not. >> The developers that we are looking to attract to work on solaris >> should have no problem understanding how to configure their path for >> their preferences. > > Without wanting to sound superior, I'm not so sure about that. People > coming from a Linux background will take some time to figure out what > they need, and it represents a "barrier to entry" where some > proportion of them will just assume Solaris sucks and give it up as a > bad job. > I understand the need to make the defaults look as comfortable as possible. I just think there are things we could do to engineer that default without disabling the flexibility that Solaris has today.
A previous example was 'make'. How it's not expected to be in /usr/ucb. If you told me you wanted to move things from /usr/ucb to /usr/bin, I wouldn't object at all. That is moving Soalris tools from one dir to another. That's not bringing in a whole lot of non-solaris stuff into /usr/bin that should be optional on a per user basis. > >> A second reason to not do this: >> [...] >> It's bad practice in general to begin have an NFS directory too early >> in your $PATH. > > NFS or no, the more names you dump into /usr/bin (which is expected to > be early in people's PATH), the more likely you are to mask some local > application (or locally tailored version of an application) in a > directory further down the PATH which I think violates the Principle > of Least Astonishment. > Exactly. -Kyle
