I am wondering where our guidance for where items should live in the
namespace is.
I had a personal idea related to /sbin, which I was sure of, but was
told by several
older and wiser PSARC members that my understanding was incorrect. Older
UNIX,
and current FreeBSD have a manpage named HIER(7) that documented what one
could expect where. Did Solaris lose this concept, or do I just not know
where to find it?
My opinion is that a document like HIER(7) should be used to guide what
you put in
a modified $PATH, rather than /etc/profile. To me /etc/profile should be
a minimal default,
HIER(7) indicates what type of applications to expect where, and your
personal $PATH
defines what you personally want to be "found" without explicitly
specifying the entire path,
and which function you want in case of conflicting names. The value of
explicit paths
for questionable directories should not be undervalued, as I found out
when I had "."
in my $PATH and had my $CWD be a bin of a "creative" Caltech student. I
have never had "."
in my path since, and tend to shy away from /usr/local/bin, and /opt for
similar reasons.
As for /usr/games. I actually think that having "entertainment" software
there makes good since
so that users do not think that "nethack" is some kind of network
utility, and that you may want
to be worried about a program called "crash" that is not in an expected
place.
Ps: what happened to crash? It seams to be missing from Solaris. I would
have thought
it to be part of SVID.
-Charles
Ceri Davies wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 08:50:23AM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>
>> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>>
>>> I'd be a fan of fewer things in /usr/bin, and perhaps longer search
>>> paths for users (/usr/bin, /usr/gnome/bin, /usr/X11/bin, /usr/games (or
>>> /usr/games/bin), etc. I'm not sure when the last time we modified the
>>> default search path for users was, though....
>>>
>> The big problem there is there is no system-wide default search path for
>> users we can easily modify. dtlogin & gdm set a PATH for GUI logins,
>> and those have changed several times in the last few years. Indiana
>> ships a PATH in the ~/.profile it creates for new users (the ever
>> controversial "/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/bin" PATH).
>>
>
> There's the PATH setting in /etc/default/{login,su} as well.
>
> Ceri
>
