On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:04:35PM -0800, John Plocher wrote: > The disconnect here is semantic: > > Before this proposal, it was possible to construct a PATH that provided > > Solaris/Posix/SUS utilities first, > "latest and greatest" GNU utilities second. > > After this proposal, it will no longer be possible to do so because the > namespace used by the "latest and greatest" will be overridden by names > found > in /usr/bin.
I don't agree in that this was always possible, though before serendipitous discovery we might have refrained from doing this. But serendipitous discovery changed things and that's not this case. > If I were to put the latest and greatest directory in front of /usr/bin > in my PATH, *those* bits would collide with the POSIX/SUS namespace. > > Lose/Lose both ways. > > The only way this proposal "works" is if the GNU bits are treated as their > own consolidation, and that consolidation can be updated and installed > by whomever needs it. All other options seem to result in replicated > variant copies of the bits... But this gets you into version dependency hell if the GNU utils maintainers start breaking backwards compatibility. Not good. Nico --
