On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 10:38:29AM -0800, John Plocher wrote: > Bart Smaalders wrote: > >OpenSolaris supports multiple command environments, but it does > >so through placing alternate versions of commands found in /usr/bin > >ahead in the user's path. > > I want the gnu bits to be usable on Solaris as well, but I am concerned > that this proposal will have unintentional side effects down the road: > > A) A problem with comparing XPG4 with the gnu stuff is that the > XPG4 bits don't evolve very fast, the XPG4 bits are, in many > cases, derived from the /usr/bin bits (or vice-versa), and > there isn't an external provider of the XPG4 bits. The GNU > bits don't share these attributes.
This seems irrelevant, particularly in light of serendipitous discovery. That ship has sailed. Users who put /usr/gnu/bin first, or who use non-conflicting GNU tools will find that some interfaces are less than Committed and may change backwards-incompatibly at times -- no differently than in GNU/Linux. Tough. You get what you ask for (and we're often the ones asking for it). Besides, I suspect that in practice the FSF GNU tools will be much more stable than that, though we may not make any stronger commitment to their stability than their maintainers would. And even then, maybe a lower commitment, since even 3rd parties that adopt our interface stability and release taxonomies will very likely nonetheless have different timescales for minor and major releases than OpenSolaris will, which would force OpenSolaris to either lag behind or break compatibility. Unless someone provides resources to resync new functionality while preserving old interfaces (as we have often done in other FOSS cases, such as with SUNWssh and OpenSSH resyncs). Nico --
