On 1/12/2009 5:13 PM, Shawn Walker wrote:
> Chris Quenelle wrote:
>> Torrey McMahon wrote:
>>> I might be asking a lot here but it would be nice if there was some
>>> CLI/GUI widget that lists all of the relevant versions and lets a user
>>> select the one they want to be their preferred version. Netbeans has
>>> something like that last I checked though it's product specific.
>>
>> This is certainly a very reasonable thing to ask. But we don't yet have
>> any distribution with more than one version bundled. So we decided
>> to defer this until we got more user feedback. The argument against
>> this
>> is that the normal UNIX way of doing this is to use your PATH to select
>> a customized search order if you are not happy with the default
>> search order. If you put /usr/compilers/XXXX/bin (or whatever) in your
>> path before /usr/bin, then you can select which compiler you want to
>> be the "default" compiler. This works for command-line selection.
>> Controlling which compiler is seen by a configure script that
>> looks stright at /usr/bin/cc is a harder problem, and requires some
>> sort of package change.
>>
>> In my mind, I am hoping we can get by with telling users to use the
>> package manager to uninstall the "sunstudioXXXXlinks" package, and
>> install a different, non-default "XXXXlinks" package to control
>> which symlinks they want in /usr/bin. But that's still very tentative
>> at this point.
>
> ...and the symlinks approach also happens to be the best model for
> working with the pkg(5) system at the moment as far as I'm aware.
>
> packages are manageable; random symlinks are not and just end punting
> the management onto another program.
What's the plan for systems that have multiple users or users that
require access to different versions at different times? In theory you'd
want to allow a user to have access to multiple versions of the
{toolkit, compiler, ...} and let them select which they want as default.
It might be as simple as, "Have the user change their path" but it
shouldn't be that hard to do and the system shouldn't get in the way. If
I have /usr/bin in my path and all those symlinks are in the way I'd
have to make sure I place /path/to/the/version I want at the front every
time I want to override. (Perhaps do the logout/login cha-cha too.)
Setting an environment variable is a bit easier but requires a lot more
work on the part of the packagers. I'm thinking along the lines of
ISALIST when used, ironically, when building things in the first place.
