[companion-discuss] Re: [tools-discuss] Proposing /usr/gnu, 3

[Bill Sommerfeld]

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 18:05, Stephen Hahn wrote:
>    With various corrections and enhancements.  More suggestions? 

one other thing to consider:

if you too vigorously encourage the merging of /usr/gnu/bin/* features
into /usr/bin you'll collide with the "advice" (section 6) of the
opinion to 1999/645 CLIP:

-------------

6.  Advisory Information

Retrofitting legacy utilities to the CLIP specification is a
significant management decision. There are significant costs
and marginal associated  benefit.  There  would  be  nothing
wrong  with  chartering  projects  to  extend  appropriately
defined sets (as discussed in [1]) of utilities, but  it  is
very  likely  that  there  are  better  ways to direct those
resources.  In particular, the committee sees little motiva-
tion  to extend the core UNIX utilities maintained by the ON
Consolidation.

The unchartered conversion of legacy utilities to  the  CLIP
specification  by  engineers should also be discouraged.  It
is almost assured that a few such projects will be presented
with  the  rationale  that it was done on the engineer's own
time. Accepting such projects is likely to  lead  to  incon-
sistent  expectations on commands even though consistency is
understood to be the primary desire of our customers.  After
a few such integrations, we can expect customer RFEs (possi-
bly submitted as bugs) requesting that  utilities  in  other
areas of the system be converted.

Despite the above concerns, implementing the common forms of
the  help  and version options would be a universally desir-
able activity.

Functional areas are encouraged  to  develop  (and  publish)
extended  sets  of  preferred  option letters and subcommand
names.

--------------

now, this was written before opensolaris was on anyone's radar.  Times
have changed so maybe it's not as critical..  but engineer cycles are as
always tight...