Joseph Kowalski wrote:
> This implies to me, that all this proposal would buy you is the ability
> to go out of your way to
> construct a system where the various components could be selected by
> path without a fall through
> to /usr/bin.
Putting the executables all in /usr/bin has failure modes as Kyle
pointed out. It seems worthwhile to try to address them if we can.
As Alan points out as well, the problem with the "put it all into /usr/bin"
is that I can no longer eeasily replace/upgrade the various OSS bits on
my system to the latest ones released by their owners because Sun (or
OpenSolaris) has chosen to bundle an old version in such a way as to make
it impossible for me to replace it.
> In a distributed computing world, you couldn't depend upon
> this. How many people
> would use this?
The distributed world at Sun seems to be able to depend on /usr/dist (an NFS
filesystem that has 20Gb of shared executables) while at the same time allowing
individual servers/workstations the ability to override the bits they provide.
Part of the difficulty we are having with OSS stuff is that we are not
acknowledging that [Open]Solaris is just a small part of the bigger picture;
that we are _not_ the owners of these bits, and the bits evolve at faster rates
than we do. Every time we taks a bit of OSS out of its global context and
shove it into a dusty corner of [Open]Solaris, we are making it harder for
developers to "just use" [Open]Solaris.
Another goal here is what Roy said:
> As a developer, I really don't care where these tools are provided
> as long as it is possible to find them on the path and, once found,
> the tools are exactly as distributed by the tool author.
Sun's Marketing doesn't really care about the technical issues around
/usr/bin and /usr/gnu; they are more interested in the default user
experience. The OSS bits need to be delivered by default and work by
default. In their mind, a new user on Solaris *should* be able to log
in, download a project off of Sourceforge, type ./configure; make;
make install, and have it all just work.
-John
