Stefan Teleman wrote:
>
>
> James Carlson wrote:
>> Stefan Teleman writes:
>>> James Carlson wrote:
>>>> I'm a bit confused about what's going on here. On a Nevada 101
>>>> system, I see no /usr/bin/gas on the system at all, though it does
>>>> have SUNWbinutils installed, and I can see /usr/sfw/bin/gas. On an
>>>> OpenSolaris 0.99 system, I see a /usr/bin/gas symlink coming from
>>>> SUNWbinutils that points over to /usr/sfw.
>>>>
>>>> What the ... ?
>>> That was my implied point. There does not seem to be a consistent
>>> approach here, with the existing SUNWbinutils.
>>
>> Yep.
>>
>> I have no idea how the OpenSolaris distribution became inconsistent in
>> this way, but perhaps it doesn't matter for ARC purposes: OpenSolaris
>> is still just an unintegrated project, which means that they needn't
>> conform necessarily with any particular architecture.
>
> The other problem with having symlinks in /usr/bin is that we implicitly
> assert a preference for one version of binutils, or GCC, over another.
> Meaning: as long as there is only one version of binutils, or GCC,
> available, everything is fine: the symlinks in /usr/bin point to the
> sole instance. This no longer holds when there is more than one version
> of either component available: we are making an implicit value judgement
> ("the latest version is the one we like best"). This can create binary
> compatibility problems.
I believe that value judgement is still made with a non version numbered
symlink in /usr/gnu/bin/. The only way not to make the value judgement
is to "hide" them all in versioned subdirs and that isn't a good thing
for users.
I think we *should* make a preference on which is the canonical version
or we should only ever ship one version at a time.
--
Darren J Moffat
