* James Carlson <james.d.carlson at Sun.COM> [2007-01-31 09:01]: > Kyle McDonald writes: > > 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. > > You're missing at least two downsides that've already been discussed: > > - The behavior of the system for ordinary users depends on whether > the administrator has installed this special package. Thus, users > are (at least to some degree) beholden to administrators to set up > their environment. > > - The behavior of Solaris systems ends up being uneven. Some will > install the package, some will not. Users who must move between > these systems will be confused, and their $PATH configurations > will have different effects on each.
There's one more, although it's secondary: the symlinks package must change with the addition of any new component, and is only sensible if all relevant packages are installed. SFW is going through the effort of breaking apart its manpage and header packages, because we get false positives (manual pages and headers for absent components) and increased costs (N + 2 package updates instead of N). - Stephen -- Stephen Hahn, PhD Solaris Kernel Development, Sun Microsystems stephen.hahn at sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/sch/
