> >Another crazy idea would be to make utilities > sensitive to a certain > >environment variable that defines the default > "flavor". It doesn't work > >out of the box exactly, but it could be made almost > OOB if the choice of > >flavor is offered when the user account is created - > and for most > >newbies that would also be install time, since the > new installer will > >create the default non-root account - and > automatically add that > >environment variable to ~/.profile. > > Nice idea, but it has one drawback: it still doesn't > fix the scripting > issues.
You want consistent behavior in existing scripts, and the option of new behavior interactively and in new scripts that ask for it somehow. It seems to me that you need something added to all shells that allows for different behavior interactively vs in scripts. That could be aliases (if the shell should do the work) or it could be another environment variable (INTERACTIVE_INVOCATION=true) that would have to be set together with the UNIVERSE (or whatever) variable, and that the shell would explicitly not pass to a command run from a script (if the decision how to behave should be left to the command, given that it was provided sufficient information to know when altered defaults might be relatively harmless). I want to see something that only needs a single switch to set, per new account or per system, and that can be added to existing accounts by simply adding one line to the top of their .cshrc/.kshrc/.bashrc file (sh users are tougher, although one might fake aliases with functions up to a point). Beyond that aspect of simple setup and administration, and that stuff that currently runs on Solaris will be unaffected, and that it's maintainable and doesn't create new barriers to porting, I don't know that I care to much how it's done. But I really would rather see that integrated than see a separate distro as the means of accomplishing that sort of accomodation. With lots of systems, I'd just as soon have _one_ Solaris (at least in terms of a Sun distro, and not counting development releases like SXCE/SXDE), with simple per-system and per-account switches to tailor behavior; anything else would increase my maintenance load (subset of users want universe L behavior so I have to reload their workstation or do substantial customizations to alter its behavior or their account's? yuck). This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
