We (OpenSolaris developers) wish to deliver a functionally
complete system. It is not a kit car of parts to be assembled
by skilled users. To that end, the default install should not
require mucking around with PATH, etc, to find all the software
we ship with OpenSolaris.
To that end, I think the proposal as presented obeys the
principle of least surprise, and should work "out of the
box" ("off the dvd?") for the maximal number of users.
Users who wish to customize the bits we deliver into a more
pleasing form have several options:
1 They can select between alternate environments provided
with OpenSolaris using their PATH variable.
2 They can create a ~user/bin that is a forest of
symlinks into various parts of the system to create their
own pastiche mixing traditional Solaris, xpg4, ucb and gnu commands.
3 They can choose to not install all of the packages
that are part of whatever OpenSolaris distro they're
running, and provide more desirable bits themselves,
either locally or via NFS.
In any case, a selection of /usr/bin as the default
install location for useful binaries of any provenance
enables the maximum number of users and does not forestall
either substitution or removal of unwanted components.
Attempting to confine exogenous software to alternate locations
does nothing to facilitate its replacement with alternative versions,
nor does it help indicate what license it was shipped with or
what level of support might be expected. The sole result of
moving various components of the system into various directories
has been to make the system harder to use. It's time we stopped
doing this.
- Bart
--
Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
