Hi, Realistically, speaking from an enterprise point of view, companies are use to dealing with multiple platforms (Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Redhat, Suse, etc.) and rarely do much to bring parity between them. At best, they'll create dotfiles that build the correct PATHs and environment variables for users that work on multiple platforms. Plus they may build or install certain tools, some GNU and some non-GNU, across each platform. Now when you're talking about commercial and custom software (or scripts for that matter), they all have methods (IFs, CASEs,etc.) to adjust to each OS platform. So ultimately the inconsistencies between each UNIX and Linux flavor are taken into account.
And here we come out of the woodwork with OpenSolaris and trying to hop on the GNU/Linux bandwagon just for the sake of Linux users. While it may sound nice for people that are use to that, for everyone else this is a real pain in the butt. It's good to have multiple tool sets to please everyone, but I do question the concept of morphing into our competition just to play nice. The different tool sets in Solaris/OpenSolaris is its strength, not its weakness. On top of that, having strong standards is what makes Solaris/OpenSolaris a solid platform for the enterprise. I've already had plenty of Sun and non-Sun products fall over themselves on OpenSolaris thanks to the whole ksh vs ksh93 issue. As a result, I've had to fix other peoples scripts just to get software to install or run. Fortunately, OpenSolaris is not being used in the enterprise yet. Because if it were, Sun Oracle would not be able to keep up with the huge number of complaints what pile up. Breaking things for customers, ISVs, and vendors just to make OpenSolaris "Linux Happy" doesn't sound like a good strategy to me. This doesn't mean that I'm not in favor of having GNU or other tool sets in OpenSolaris. I just question changing defaults and standards that ultimately cause grief for our users and customers. Personally, I like the idea of having all the GNU tools in /usr/gnu, just like we do with /usr/ast, /usr/ucb, /usr/xpg4, and /usr/xpg6. This is the same convention that we've had in Solaris for ages. Not to mention our other tool sets are installed the same way, /usr/apache*, /usr/ccs, /usr/cluster, /usr/dt, /usr/eclipse, /usr/java*, /usr/j2se, /usr/jdk, /usr/mysql, /usr/netbeans, /usr/opends, /usr/perl5, /usr/php, /usr/postgres, /usr/sunvts, etc. I strongly believe in the continuation of this standard and to just sym-link key binaries into /usr/bin. Users and customers will always customize their shell profiles and PATH's, it's inevitable. If we want to make it easier without causing pain for everyone, how about these compromises? 1. Add the default Solaris profiles under /etc/skel. Differentiate them with *.sun and *.gnu. Hey, why not do the same for ast, xpg4, and xpg6? 2. Add an option to useradd to select Solaris or GNU profile when creating an account. 3. Add an option in the installer to change the default behavior. 4. Add a command that can change the default behavior. Doing this should make everyone happy and stop the madness over if we should switch our foldgers crystals from our beloved Solaris flavor to Penguin flavor. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixconsole at yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Milan Jurik <milan.ju...@sun.com> To: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> Cc: PSARC-ext at sun.com; Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at sun.com>; shell-discuss at opensolaris.org Sent: Sat, March 20, 2010 10:34:44 AM Subject: Re: More ksh93 builtins Hi, Alan Coopersmith p??e v p? 19. 03. 2010 v 16:39 -0700: > [Removed the case id, since this is off-topic for the case which isn't > currently > on the table for discussion anyway.] > Good idea. > Garrett D'Amore wrote: > > 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. > > But clearly all our paying Solaris 10 customers already have dotfiles to > set $PATH, given how useless the default Solaris 10 $PATH is. > I would be very carefull with claiming "all our paying Solaris 10 customers"... > They get familiarity by continuing to use those - the default PATH with > /usr/gnu/bin first only affects those setting up new accounts who don't > have existing Solaris .dotfiles, which seems like a very reasonable > compromise. > Well, "setting up new accounts" means also setting all new installations, even by customers already maintaining older Solaris systems. > Also rememeber the PATH default is set only in text files which are trivially > editable by users with experience from previous Solaris releases - it's not > baked into the kernel. > But it is still not solving problem of hidden features in default installation for newcommers. Best regards, Milan _______________________________________________ opensolaris-arc mailing list opensolaris-arc at opensolaris.org
