On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 05:16:34PM +0000, Pete Bentley wrote: > >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.
That's an argument for closing off /usr/bin. Everything should go into a /usr/pkg/*/bin or /opt/*/bin or whatever, and every user is responsible for maintaining a very long PATH or a lynk farm. Engineering is about trade-offs, and that's not a very good one. Making 90% of users happy and telling the other 10% to manage their PATHs is a very reasonable engineering decision, and you can see serendipitous discovery as just that. As for things like the multiplicity of versions of things like Perl or Apache, this is the case regardless of whether any one version of those appears in /usr/bin. When you know you need a specific version of Perl then use that in your scripts, not the default version. Nico --
