James Carlson wrote: > Kyle McDonald writes: > > >> I don't know the answers to all therse questions. I beleive they are >> answerable, but I know Sun had a timetable, and probably didn't want to >> hold up that one ARC case to hashing out this bigger problem. >> > > Untrue. We held that exact discussion. > > It was discussed, but I got the (perhaps wrong?) impression that final path chosen dended up not needing answers to those questions, and so I was never sure how set in stone the possible answers to those questions really were at the end of that discussion.
I thought one of the reasons for going the route chosen was that it avoided many if not all of those quesitons. >> I think the /usr/gnu case decided only things that were GNU (FSF I >> bleieve) that *conflicted* with things already in /usr/bin were to be >> put in /usr/gnu. This means that you might find GNU tar under the name >> tar in /usr/gnu, and again under the name gtar in /usr/bin, but you >> wouldn't find gtar in /usr/gnu. >> > > Correct. > > >> GCC would be found in /usr/bin I assume >> ince I know of no conflict. >> > > It'd be reasonable to have GCC as /usr/gnu/bin/cc, if someone wanted > it. > > True if it is called 'cc'. I was thinking of a binary called 'gcc' and trying to use that as an example to show Joerg what i was talking about. >> There are hard and fast rules inside of Sun, from experiences with >> customers (from what I remember) complaining when the default PATH had >> been changed in the past. No one was willing to discuss changing the >> default PATH in /etc/default/login. >> > > This ground, as well as the long term effects of putting random open > source stuff in /usr/bin, has been trampled extensively. > > I'm somewhat sympathetic to the complaints that we're treating > /usr/bin as a dumping ground. I _wasn't_ in favor of the plan. To a > large extent, it's driven by earlier decisions -- most notably the > decision to use GNOME as a desktop. > > However, it's long since been decided, and the discussion issues that > you've raised here -- repeatedly -- are really pointless. They don't > result in any useful changes or shine any light on the problem. > > Aggreed. Case closed. I wasn't looking to discuss them again. Just pointing them out to Joerg in case it wasn't clear. I thought maybe my interpretation could clear it up. > If you're really interested in changing this, rather than just > contributing to the debating society, then I urge you to put together > a project proposal. Propose something concrete that will alter or > abolish these decisions, and put something more to your liking in > place: > > PSARC 1999/555 Getting with the Freeware Program > PSARC 2005/185 Enabling serendipitous discovery > > PSARC 2007/047 /usr/gnu > > I might. If I had what I beleived were good answers to all the other questions I listed above. I think good answers exist, but I haven't found them yet. That's exactly what I was trying to say. I haven't avoided dicussing it since I'm hoping that good ideas might come to someone else on these lists even though I haven't found them myself. > Otherwise, given the previous clear decisions, our choices on these > new cases become quite clear. You might not like ImageMagick in > /usr/bin, but given our current direction, it's an entirely proper > and consistent decision. > Aggreed. I'm not trying to say anything otherwise. In fact I thought I said that to Joerg. I was trying to say that while he and I may have some visions of how it would be 'ideally' that are nearly parallel, our take on how it is is totally opposite. I feel that liek you have said when it came down to the case of 'compare' wether you look at the 'First to Integrate' rule, or the 'more popular, more useful' rule, Imagemagik wins. I'd take ImageMagik in a heartbeat over his compare. > For what it's worth, I've made my peace with those decisions. There > are aspects I don't like, but there's more that I *do* like, so even > if someone complains that having everything easily accessible is too > much like Linux, I'm not picking up that fight. > > I don't like them either, but for the time being I'm made my peace too, and I'm learning to live with it until I come up with something else that I feel is worth proposing. The 'Been there. Discussed that. Don't want to revisit it.' attitude makes it hard for people like me to even consider proposeing something unless we feel it will address (nearly?) every concern everyone who will need to approve it will have. And coming up with that checklist to verify against before proposing it is tough. Though I'm sure the case materials contain a good start. There's just this aurora of "we don't want to waste time on this again no matter how good an idea you have" about this subject. -Kyle _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
