On 03/22/10 09:46 AM, Darren Reed wrote:
> On 22/03/10 07:21 AM, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> Milan Jurik wrote:
>>> Alan Coopersmith p??e v p? 19. 03. 2010 v 16:39 -0700:
>>>> 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"...
>> Okay, make it "Any Solaris 10 customer (paying or not) who actually
>> wants
>> to use the system" - given the lack of some basic commands in the
>> default
>> path, such as /usr/sbin/ping or /usr/ccs/bin/make, the Solaris 10
>> default
>> PATH shows we've long required customers to change the default PATH to
>> actually make the system usable to either sysadmins or developers.
>
> And...?
>
> I doubt there exists a system where system administrators
> and/or developers don't customise their path. Go back and
> read Octave Orgeron's email.
>
> The only difference is the names of which components are
> required and in which order to make a command line
> environment that the user likes.
Many sites may use customization by just *appending* to the default
path. Its not unreasonable to assume that the system sets a default
path that is reasonable for most end-user applications, and to just add
to it.
However, /usr/gnu being at the head of $PATH is IMO not "reasonable";
the tools there diverge significantly from "standard" Solaris tools, and
don't expose all feature sets as Milan indicated.
I intend to protest this change in PSARC 2010/067.
>
> What the default path, in /etc/default and elsewhere, really
> impact are things like:
> - install scripts (that don't use ~/.foo)
> - how scripts run remotely when ~/.foo isn't read
> - at/cron jobs
> - other uses of $SHELL where ~/.foo isn't read
Yes, it impacts those. And maybe others! But we shouldn't be having
this debate. If the default PATH provides reasonable values, then we
won't have to deal with this kind of problem worrying about pre-existing
user environments and site preferences vs. our defaults.
- Garrett
