It seems that most common concern with installing the FSF/GNU binaries in /usr/bin is that they will become obsolete and [some] users/admins want to use their own, newer versions instead, which they can only do through link farms or aliases.
I think this is a valid concern, but not an architectural one and is more related to Solaris processes and resources and not necessarily an issue for opensolaris based distributions in general. That said, I agree that Sun should do something about this. Shipping obsolete external open source packages is clearly a disservice to customers. The solution should not be keeping them elsewhere so users can ignore them, but keeping them up-to-date. Laca On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 22:00 -0800, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > > > Except that historically /usr/bin isn't all of a > > single provenance. So > > you want to take a snapshot of /usr/bin as it stands > > today and "copy" it > > to some other location where we'll only ever add... > > what? nothing? > > hings developed at Sun? or in the OpenSolaris > > community but not of some > > other FOSS or even proprietary provenance? > > Past a snapshot at the present time (give or take some things that > arguably shouldn't have gone into /usr/bin in the first place, like > the > GNOME stuff), only things added specifically via Sun or OpenSolaris; > that way, they would not simply be out-of-sync snapshots of FOSS from > elsewhere that sites might wish to use their own builds of, > whether to be more nearly current or to standardize on specific > versions > enterprise-wide. Typically, I'd see those as either not conflicting
