On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Roland Mainz wrote:
> My personal complaint is that they stuff everything into /usr/bin/. Unix
> had some kind of "namespace" support via the elements in ${PATH} so
> having package groups seperated into /usr/dt/bin/ (CDE), /usr/kde3/bin
> (KDE3), /usr/xpg4/bin/ (XPG4 personality) and so on is a much cleaner
> approach than stuffing everything into /usr/bin/. Same applies to
> ${MANPATH}&.co. There is no real way anymore to set/override/disable
> things since it's now all in /usr/bin/. In my experience as an
> adminstrator with many users (who all have different requirements) this
> design is VERY VERY bad in real life.
1000s of programs in /usr/bin sucks, but it does offer two benefits over
the Solaris "shove everything in a different obscure dir" style:
1. the programs users want are likely in their $PATH
2. incompatible versions have to be named differently (bash2 vs bash3, for
example), so users have a chance of knowing they're actually incompatible
(doesn't mean they'll have a clue which one they want / need, but that's a
different problem)
The Solaris approach has the wonderful property of encouraging 40
different versions of ps, each subtly different, and your users are
guaranteed either to:
1. not have the one they want in their $PATH
2. have the one they want in their $PATH, but only after one they don't
want
Both LSB and Solaris approaches are broken, just in different ways ;-)
later,
chris
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