Joep Vesseur wrote:
> On 08/21/09 22:31, John Fischer wrote:
>
>
>> This project proposes to integrate the Environment Modules within a
>> Minor release of Solaris (i.e., Open Solaris). The environment modules
>> provides an easy modification to a user's environment via TCL scripts.
>> These scripts set various environmental variables such as PATH, MANPATH,
>> etc.
>>
>
> I'm not sure my remarks make any PSARC sense, but since there is no
> rationale mentioned for integrating this, I'm inclined to ask anyway:
>
> Does it really make sense to force people into being able to read/
> write TCL in order for them to configure their shell? I imagine
> that most of the modulefile(4)s would be written by administrators
> (how many of them speak TCL?), but users will have to debug/override
> any settings they want to tweak.
>
> I'm just wondering why we pick a TCL-based configuration tool for
> something like this. If the answer is Linux-compatibility, I think
> there is enough precedent, whether I like it or not. Otherwise, I'm
> not sure that we build a useful architecture here.
>
> Joep
>
I'm fairly confident that *except* in so far as we are integrating
something which some sites or projects might already be using (and hence
are offering it as a compatibility/familiarity tool), this case would
not otherwise be ready for PSARC to vote on... I think we'd want to have
a lot more scrutiny over a change intended to fundamentally alter the
way user environments are managed.
So, as a Linux familiarity tool (and I have to take the word of others
here that this tool really is used by enough folks to make our time
spent on this case worthwhile), I'll give it a +1.
However, I'd have much more grave reservations about making this case a
precedent setting case for the fundamental way user environments are
managed (or that we recommend they be managed.)
I still remain, at a fundamental level, unhappy that we have no way of
distinguishing to our users, or to our ISV partners, which technologies
we believe are fundamentally architecturally correct and "first class",
and those technologies which we integrated simply to make us conform
more closely to Linux (and which we might elect to steer users and ISVs
away from.) But unfortunately at present we have no framework to
provide this information to the people who need it most.
-- Garrett
