Edward O'Callaghan wrote:
> Are you guys having it on for sys admin day ?! I hope your joking..
Not at all.
> You can `visualize` the file system structure as two distinct
> categories; Core - {kernel, shell}, X11 {Core, X11}.
> This is, at least, how I like to see it.
But GNOME & KDE are part of the kernel? Solaris & OpenSolaris
have many sizable subsystems, but we've mostly abandoned long ago
the idea of keeping them separated in /usr/*/bin directories.
That you see the system as Core vs. X11 is just a sign that we're
the last major holdout.
> I believe mostly everyone is aware that Solaris puts X11 under
> /usr/X11 and few who do not (easy to fix a -L/-R pair).
Actually, -L & -R haven't been needed since SUNWxwrtl was added in
Solaris 2.6.
> There is *very* little gained if anything at all considering the time
> needed to make the changes, Do we have *far* more pressing things at
> hand at the moment,
> example, GEM, xcb, etc.. integration and much much more !
>
> For example, users care about VT support far more then these kinds of,
> imho, pointless changes. (I'm aware VT is coming soon, its just a
> example).
I'm glad you think our engineers are all omnipotent, with completely
interchangeable skill sets, who could work on any of those things with
ease. Unfortunately, reality is much harsher.
I can make the change to move the files from /usr/X11 to /usr quite
easily, but I can't contribute to GEM or DRI in any meaningful way
without spending months learning how those subsystems work, and
Solaris kernel internals in general. Don't assume that working on
this will slow down the other engineers working on those things in
any meaningful way - most of the people doing that work wouldn't
know where to start in making these changes if I were foolish enough
to ask them to put their projects aside to work on this instead.
(Truthfully, I always suspected we might want to make this change
someday, so did try in much of our build system to use $(X11_DIR)
and the like instead of hardcoded /usr/X11 paths, so a large portion
of the changes needed will be simply changing X11_DIR=/usr/X11 to
X11_DIR=/usr. The package paths are a simple global replace in
the SVR4 packages, and using the new paths from the beginning in
the IPS packages.)
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
