> Stefan Teleman wrote: > > The PHP Group currently has *no interest whatsoever* in Solaris. > > That is too bad, but doesn't really change my suggestion that it > would be good to push these changes upstream so that > others could benefit from it.
While it probably beneficial to try and push the changes upstream, the main effect will likely be on other OpenSolaris distros. I have spent years pushing Solaris changes to buckets of open source software only to see them denied, argued, or ignored, because of the gatekeepers who maintain the troll booth at the entrance to CVS or Subversion. > Ask yourself how the various > OpenSolaris distros (including pseudo-distros like SunFreeware, > Blastwave, ...) could all benefit from this work? Could we get to the > point in the future that, no matter where you choose to get your > components from, they all install into a predictable place? > <ARC snippage> > David.Comay at Sun.COM wrote: > > However, it's not recommended that they install their versions into > > /usr/php5 or /usr/perl5 since those are OpenSolaris directories. > > Effectively unbundled software should be installed by users in some > > other place in the file system such as /opt. > > Why? These components /ARE/ effectively unbundled. > We are not ally adding any value to this stuff as it passes > thru; it is the packaging and design pattern is what is important. > While we all wish to make them part of the default install for all > the OpenSolaris distros, these components are certainly not things > for which we (the OpenSolaris community) are the primary content > drivers or owners Bloat for one. /usr has become the dumping ground for all things. Instead of using /opt as a place for a repository for code that is *not* necessary for standard operations of Solaris/OpenSolaris. The pollution of /usr is just staggering. And we didn't learn from the mistakes of moving gnome out of /opt/gnome (in the 2.0beta 3) into /usr (2.0FCS), and continue to dump more unnecessary (but useful) crud there. IMHO, any software package that is a dependency for some other package (like apache 1.x needed for webex or whatever depends on it) probably has some value in being in the /usr file system. But anything else really ought to be in /opt, so it can be isolated, or just plain left out. If folks can't figure out how to use a PATH variable, then I think we are just making our path down the Open Source road more difficult as more and more gnuish/OSS stuff is just part of /usr/bin (or /usr/gnu, or /usr/sfw) Being able to weed out very specific behaviors of some commands needed for configure (Solaris' sed brokeness) comes to mind, not to mention just the confusion created by just glomming everything into to one big directory. > Your argument makes sense for a distro - Sun probably > does not wish to have its customers randomly update its Solaris > distro, but we are talking here about OpenSolaris, where there is a need > to be able to refresh and redeliver these components as the > upstream source evolves; how can developers and users who need a later > version take advantage of this work? I think we are all better served by moving more software out to /opt which is not depended upon by any other Solaris package, and coming up with a unified strategy for directory naming and hierarchy. There is no unified strategy, so users are going to do what ever they are comfortable with. If we come develop a strategy that makes sense, is coherent and easy to follow and maintain, we will make OpenSolaris much more robust that the other distributions which are a random dumping ground for Open Source software. This message posted from opensolaris.org
