Kyle McDonald wrote: > Joseph Kowalski wrote: >> We want to start putting all user utilities with non-conflicting names >> into /usr/bin. > Why? Please NO! > > I know I'm just a lowly long time user of Solaris, but please don't > polute /usr/bin with this stuff. > [...] > PATH is the solution to this. It's a good solution.
It's a good solution for people who understand Solaris already and know which directories they might need in their PATH, but I get the impression this proposal is intended to create a "comfort zone" for people coming from environments where they might expect a complete GNU userland by default. However, rather than dumping it all in /usr/bin it might be better to create a new bin directory (/usr/dustbin?) for those people which is simply a symlink farm out to the various /usr/*/bin directories (much the way Veritas put links from /opt/VRTS/bin/* to all their /opt/VRTS/*/bin/* executables). Or this could even be achieved with package (SUNWlinuxcomfort) which was not installed by default, and which built out a symlink farm from /usr/bin ... That seems link an ugly solution to me though. > The developers that > we are looking to attract to work on solaris should have no problem > understanding how to configure their path for their preferences. Without wanting to sound superior, I'm not so sure about that. People coming from a Linux background will take some time to figure out what they need, and it represents a "barrier to entry" where some proportion of them will just assume Solaris sucks and give it up as a bad job. > A second reason to not do this: > [...] > It's bad practice in general to begin have an NFS directory too early in > your $PATH. NFS or no, the more names you dump into /usr/bin (which is expected to be early in people's PATH), the more likely you are to mask some local application (or locally tailored version of an application) in a directory further down the PATH which I think violates the Principle of Least Astonishment. Pete.
