Keith M Wesolowski writes: > /usr/sfw was a mistake. It had nothing to do with "personality" and > everything to do with keeping that Evil Freeware out of the default > path. The two problems there are that "freeware" isn't a personality,
I'm not going to try to defend /usr/sfw (I think it was a mistake as well), but that's not _quite_ the reasoning that was used here. The reasoning was that we (at one point) felt that it was counter to Sun's long standing reputation for stability to allow items that could experience incompatible change in a patch to appear on a default path. This was just as true for things written in house as for things that were imported from open source or from any other place. The original location of the source didn't matter at all; the promise of stability did. In moving it off the main path (so that users would be _forced_ to ask deliberately to have it on their own paths), the question came up of where it ought to go. Some things are under other paths, but most bundled freeware ended up under /usr/sfw. I don't think that anyone at Sun ever thought or now thinks that freeware of any sort was "Evil" -- or "bad" or any synonym for it. Just that we were in no position to guarantee that it would be unchanged at inopportune times, and that mixing stable and unstable things in the same location was "bad." (Again, I'm not trying to defend /usr/sfw. I don't like it, either. If you'd like to debate the wisdom of that, there's a sympathetic ear in /dev/null. ;-}) -- James Carlson, KISS Network <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ tools-discuss mailing list tools-discuss@opensolaris.org
