On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 09:32:54PM +0200, Josh Hurst wrote: > On 5/7/07, Casper.Dik at sun.com <Casper.Dik at sun.com> wrote: > > > >>But then we are back to the same problem we started with. Most would > >>agree that the current defaults are not "fine." > > > >No we're not back were we started; I strongly believe that existing > >users run an extremely large risk from anything dumped in /etc. > > In that case you are no longer allowed to update bash or ksh. Never > ever again. Freeze bash, freeze ksh and disallow any updates because > this involves the extremely large risk that users run into new > defaults set by upstream. > > Do you see how silly this is? The upstream authors provide built in > defaults and Solaris can set defaults in /etc/bash.bashrc and > /etc/ksh93.kshrc, overriding the built in defaults. Both are vendor > defaults.
I suspect Casper's point wasn't quite that. Changing default behaviours of shells, man, etc... in ways that are overridable by the customer is OK, within limits. For me the problem is how to change these default behaviours on update. If the behaviours are encoded in complex, customer-editable files, then they are not updateable. If the default behaviours are instead encoded in files that are not customer editable but can be overridden by system-wide and per-user customer-editable files, then that at least is upgradeable. Nico --
