[desktop-discuss] Re: [companion-discuss] Re: [tools-discuss] Proposing /usr/gnu, 4

[Laszlo (Laca) Peter]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 19:57 +0200, Rainer Orth wrote:
> I think there are two arguments in favor of my approach to keep GNU
> packages with conflicting parts completely below /usr/gnu:
> 
> * As we've observed a couple of times, several long-time/hardcore
>   OpenSolaris are purists who would like to stay away from the GNU
> command
>   set as far as possible.  This may partially be just religion, but
> has a
>   foundation in ...
> 
> * ... the fact that often GNU maintainers care much less then they
> should
>   about backwards compatibility: observe e.g. the case of coreutils
> where
>   on one hand the maintainers regularly change output formats of
> commands
>   at their whim (ls is an example, since the exact format isn't
> prescribed
>   by POSIX.1), while on the other hand being anal-retentive about
> standards
>   compliance to the point where they remove support for legacy option
> even
>   in cases where POSIX.1 still allowed them (stuff like head -1 being
>   removed in favor head -n 1), which caused lots of uproar in other
> parts
>   of the GNU community (e.g. GCC where lots of scripts started
> breaking
>   unnecessarily on systems that happened to have recent coreutils
>   installed).  It took quite some time and long and heated arguments
> to
>   have this at least partially resolved, so I can fully understand a
> desire
>   to stay away from such a moving target if possible.  To put this in
>   perspective, I've historically provided the GNU commands for our
> users in
>   /vol/gnu/bin, which is prepended to PATH, to provide a common
>   cross-platform experience for Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, IRIX (and before
> that,
>   even AIX and NeXTstep).  In recent years, I've become quite
> reluctant
>   to update those commands due to those incompatibilities. 

Well, both of these arguments seem to be in favour of the
/usr/sfw approach: users have to explicitely add these
interfaces in various search paths to be found.

Laca