On 11/5/07, Bill Sommerfeld <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 2007-11-04 at 10:24 -0600, Shawn Walker wrote: > > Admittedly, I am somewhat fuzzy on what software is supposed to do if > > it needs a specific version of a utility. > > It should set PATH to reflect the environment it expects.
> > For example, if a configure script decides that it wants to and needs > > to use only gnu versions of utilities on an "OpenSolaris" environment; > > should it assume that it should explicitly reference all utilities via > > the /usr/gnu/ path? > > No. It should set PATH to reflect the environment it expects. However, if the configure script is intended to run across Solaris 8, HP-UX 9, RHEL 4, and OpenSolaris, and some other platform that does not yet exist, it should check for the features it needs in each of the same named commands in $PATH and/or well-known locations. Once it finds a suitable version, it should use the full path to the command. This is the same approach that is used for headers, and libraries. For example, a software product written two years that only knows how to install with GNU install would not know to look in /usr/gnu and if Solaris was an afterthought (or not considered) /usr/sfw and /opt/sfw would not be in the PATH set in the script. If you have a script that is supposed to run on a small number of well-defined platforms (and configurations thereof) and it will be not see "production runs" on any other platform prior to testing, setting $PATH is sufficient (and arguably desirable for readability). In other words, configure scripts are a special type of script with a special purpose. When written properly, they are a lot better than the schemes that preceded autoconf. Treating every script like a configure script would be an ugly mess. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
