* James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> [2007-01-30 11:23]: > John Plocher writes: > > At some future point, we may have: Posix ls got there first, > > along with AT&T's make and Joerg's star. This means that the > > gnu ls, csw's ls, make and star and the three or four other > > versions of make all are forced to live elsewhere. Let this > > accretion continue for a while, and we will no longer be able to > > interpose any "alternate command environment" without a > > potential slew of unintended, unpredicted and undesired > > consequences. > > That's exactly my concern.
I can see how one could get anxious about such a collision, but I don't see any easy way to resolve it--other than to either ignore serendipitous discovery or not integrate at all. The project team maintains that there is no third "interesting" environment to deliver in its consolidation at present. (In John's example, star poses no conflict and the /opt/csw variants are already using the PATH mechanism to resolve conflicts, so I'm not sure what point is being made. The project team has already conceded that PATH manipulation is a crude method of selection [jmp-1], but at this point has nothing better to offer.) The specific components proposed in follow-on cases are being described at stability levels that allow them to be upgraded regularly. That's our architectural expression of intent, but we (and the entire SFW project) could in fact fail to live up to its aims as an open consolidation. I'm less sure how we express that in the architecture... - Stephen -- Stephen Hahn, PhD Solaris Kernel Development, Sun Microsystems stephen.hahn at sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
