On 03/19/10 03:52 PM, johansen at sun.com wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 08:13:48AM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>
>> The fact that we have to put /usr/gnu at the head of $PATH of new
>> users is a bit of a travesty, and I'm of the opinion that we should
>> reexamine *that* particular decision...
>>
> This is merely one opinion. There are compelling business and
> architecture cases for having the default userland be approachable by
> the majority of users of other popular unix-like operating systems. The
> /usr/gnu isn't the default in my path either, but it makes a lot of
> sense to present a userland that's familiar to users of Linux, and
> similar environments.
>
Approachable (and even familiar) does not necessarily == /usr/gnu. It
does mean having the main command flags work the same way that people
coming from foreign environments (and not just Linux, but also *BSD and
maybe other platforms like AIX or HPUX) are used to.
> Anyone is free to create a distro with a different default shell, or
> default path. Anyone is free to change their path as well as their
> shell. Your fixation on /usr/gnu's presence in the default path isn't
> productive. Why make it harder to get users from Linux and elsewhere to
> adopt Solaris?
>
I'm not proposing that it should be. I'm proposing that putting
/usr/gnu first is not necessarily the only way to achieve that goal.
I'd rather see us modernize our own tools. I resent abdication of our
own engineering, and the necessity of abandoning all good innovations
(like shell builtins) because some people feel its critical that the
only way to achieve these goals is to provide these 3rd party tools.
Its more offensive to me specifically because there is no good reason
why we can't use tools from the ksh93 community (who seems to be a lot
more willing to work with us on key engineering issues than the GNU
folks who are mostly fixated on Linux) to achieve this.
I'm also of the opinion that it is a mistake to sacrifice familiarity
for our paying Solaris 10 customers in favor of familiarity for people
coming from Linux. Which group do you think contributes more towards
the $$ that pay our salaries?
>
>> ... in which case much of the motivation behind *this* case comes into
>> question. (If /usr/gnu isn't the default for most users, then there
>> is little motivation to provide builtin wrappers for them.)
>>
> I disagree. Modulo the issues about the profile shell, I see no reason
> why it matters that the ARC delve into the minutia of shell builtins.
> In general, that's an implementation or configuration detail of the shell.
>
I guess reasonable people can disagree here. The points have been made
that these drop ins are not 100% compatible drop ins... they have ever
so slightly differing interfaces.
While normal folks should not care about the differences (they are so
tiny, like the format of --version's output), there are situations where
it can matter. That makes it a matter of concern for ARC.
> I would recommend against derailing this case in favor of one about a
> grand shell [re-]architecture. We should be making it easier add
> different shells for Solaris. Using this case as an opportunity to rail
> about Gnu is just divisive.
>
The case isn't derailed. Its waiting need spec. At the (more or less)
request of the upstream technology supplier.
- Garrett
