On Jan 13, 2009, at 7:23 PM, Douglas Walls wrote: > We chose the name 'compilers' to intentionally > indicate these are the default|builtin|preferred|bundled compilers. > There would not be multiple versions, there would always and only be > one set of bundled compilers. Versions of the unbundled Sun Studio > will continue to install into /opt, i.e. /opt/sunstudio13, > /opt/sunstudio14, etc.
Understood, but I can imagine that this would lead to some confusion in a few areas in that your result might look and smell like a bona fide Sun Studio installation, but it's not (missing Fortran, Performance Analyzer, etc). This will cause users to have to resort to knowing when or if they have to install the full, unbundled Sun Stuido environment... which as you point out installs into it's own place under /opt, per tradition. Now the user has two "same but different" compiler environments under two different paths. I believe this moves us away from the "it's there and works without any headaches" pseudo-goal I think we all desire. One of complaints I hear a lot from new adopters are the $PATH acrobatics one has to go through in certain situations because of stuff like this. One existing thing to perhaps take a cue from is how the Java JRE is bundled. These use /usr/jdk (analogous here to /usr/compilers) and each JRE version gets its own sub-directory in there. Within /usr/jdk there is a "latest" symlink that points to the JRE that is the system default. /usr/bin/java and friends are then just symlinks to /usr/jdk/ latest/bin/java (and friends.) In the end, this allows for multiple versions of the JRE to be installed, and they're all in one place instead of spread about the system. So perhaps this question has already been answered, but why couldn't Sun Studio take a similar approach, but with a full installation (C/C+ +/Fortran et al) ? /dale
