Darren J Moffat wrote: > Don Cragun wrote: >> The project team is not trying to set precedent by doing this, but I >> would expect it to be used frequently in similar cases to avoid >> backwards compatibility problems. > > Is there any reason why we shouldn't set precedent here ? > > Given what you said about standards compliant applications being > allowed to use the full path I think that says that we always want > these symlinks when we unify a /usr/bin and /usr/xpg?/bin utility > otherwise things will break. > > In case it isn't clear I think this case should be setting precedent. >
I don't mind formalizing the precedent, but this will not be the first such symlink. /usr/xpg4/bin/ipcs is a symbolic link to /usr/bin on my Solaris 10 system. Whether that was covered by a PSARC case or not is not clear to me. I definitely believe that we should not remove wholesale, the contents of /usr/xpg?/bin. Those paths have long been documented in manual pages, and thus represent an interface (regardless of what POSIX specifies). A symbolic link is cheap, and will keep some things from breaking. If someday in the future, we want to remove /usr/xpg4, then I think that would need to be a separate case, and is far far more likely to be contentious (IMO) than what I'm proposing to do here, which is basically a "no-brainer" in that we aren't busting any old interfaces. -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
