On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 10:17:33AM -0700, Ben Taylor wrote: > > 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.
Too bad. Bloat happens in part because folks develop new things, new things that others want, and in the development process we end up with multiple versions of those things and multiple consumers using a variety of versions of those things. Bloat is probably unavoidable here. /usr or /opt makes little difference -- bloat is bloat and there it is. And /usr is friendlier: you'll find default versions of tthe bloat that you want in /usr/bin/. > 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. But as we've seen with Perl and Apache already, when some bit of bloat becomes sufficiently widely used and demanded we'll end up moving it to /usr anyways. AMP *is* widely used and demanded, therefore it belongs in /usr. > 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) Location on the FS doesn't have much to do with whether you can leave something out of an install. And as we see with AMP technologies, everything eventually becomes a dependency of something else as people build new abstractions on existing technologies. Do we want to move things from /opt to /usr as they become dependencies of other things? I think there's just no way to resist the pressure to put everything we bundle in Solaris/OpenSolaris into /usr, at the very least commands in /usr/bin. The serendipitous discovery case can be seen (IMO) as acknowledging the "every bundled thing into /usr/bin" (and therefore partially or completely into /usr) approach. Because users discover things in /usr/lib too (though autoconf configure scripts and the like) the same principle should probably apply to libraries, not just commands, leaving us very close to an "every bundled thing into /usr" approach. Nico --
