[advocacy-discuss] [indiana-discuss] [osol-discuss] I'm sorry, but I just don't get it

[Peter Tribble]

On 11/6/07, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray at sun.com> wrote:
> On Nov 6, 2007, at 4:05 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>
> > Putting /usr/gnu at the head of PATH causes incompatibilities to
> > apply.
>
> Failure to put /usr/gnu at the head of PATH will cause a huge class
> of potential Solaris users to be confused and irritated and many of
> them will walk away.

I don't see that /usr/gnu is necessary or sufficient.

Generally, what people (the people I've observed anyway) expect is that

 - the up and down arrows work, and that command lines are editable
 - that typing top does the right thing
 - that typing emacs does the right thing
 - you get the idea...
 - and generally BSD behaviour is preferred over SYSV (so -k should
be the default)

So /usr/gnu is merely one way of addressing one part of the problem.

For what it's worth, I would rather see (Open)Solaris fixed so that using
/usr/gnu like this is unnecessary, but I think that the current choice
is pretty reasonable in the circumstances.

(Even if the subtle incompatibilities it generates do drive me up
the wall!)

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/