Nicolas Williams wrote: > 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. > > I'm not sure how it wasn't always possible? >> 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. > > For things I call from my command line, or my scripts using my interactive environment ($PATH) I should have to deal with something there (outside of the OS) breaking backward compatibility. I'm not sure why that's not good?
On the other hand, if other parts of solaris are going to rely on the versions of these utilities they were designed to use being on my $PATH, or in /usr/bin. Then yes *That* is 'Not good'. On one hand, I'm forced to either not install those packages, install them broken, or force my users to use old GNU utilities. Which of those choices isn't also 'Not good'? The Symlink package, fixes all of this. utilities will be at a known, OS controlled location for other packages to depend on, Can be found in /usr/bin on systems where that is desirable, and can be overridden by admins and/or users who know and want to. It seems to me that the only downside to the symlink package is that it uses symlinks. -Kyle
