[indiana-discuss] Adopt Indiana personalities (GNU and SUN)

[Jeff Brown]

> It seems like the easiest way to do that would be to
> leave the sun
> stuff in /usr/bin (for all the reasons you wrote
> above, and more) and
> stick /usr/gnu/bin first in the default path of all
> users (probably
> except root.) <br>
> <br>
> Isn't that the best of both worlds?<br>
> <br>
<br>
I think it comes down to what you what to use as your primary environment.  For instance, do you want a gnu utility based system or do you want a sun based system.
<br><br>
Take for instance the desire to install the mysql package from sunfreeware (instead of through pkg).  It installs it into /usr/local/mysql...  Try to start it up and you realize that having the gnu utils in /usr/gnu instead of /usr/local causes problems.  So you go through the effort of creating links between /usr/gnu/bin and /usr/local/bin.  Then you realize the same applies to some of the libraries in /usr/gnu/lib that need to be in /usr/local/lib.  In the Nexenta world, the utilities and libraries are located in their "normal from a gnu perspective" location.  This makes it very easy to use gnu (from a gnu perspective).
<br><br>
If you have a gnu environment (like Nexenta), you have no issues or complexities.  But if you have a sun environment, even with a "gnu personalities" or an adjustment to the PATH, you will still have problems because some things are not in the place they usually are.
<br><br>
In using Nexenta, I have to say, I loved the consistency of experience with Linux.  This is not to say that I couldn't get the same by adjusting my PATH, just that I didn't have to adjust my PATH.  In fact, with the Sun Personalities, I never needed to know that the sun utilities were located in /usr/sun -- the rare occasions when you needed invoke that personality were few and far between (for the gnu user).  As I recall, my most frequent use of the Sun Personalities was to install Java since the installation process counted on the strict functionality of the sun utilities instead of the gnu utilities. 
<br><br>
I'm sure we could create gnu personalities that would work in reverse of the sun personalities of Nexenta (still wouldn't solve my little mysql problem - not sure why we would put gnu in /usr/gnu if it normally installs to /usr/local, but okay, that's the way it is).  
<br><br>
But I think it still boils down to what do you want for your primary environment -- gnu centric or sun centric.  For me personally, much of what I use is gnu centric so I love the idea and the approach Nexenta took with Sun Personalities.  What I didn't like about Nexenta is that they abandoned the desktop in favor of more of a pure core.
<br><br>
Nexenta also did a great job with apt-clone -- their version of doing a zfs snap upgrade -- handles everything from managing the snap and clone to roll back in the event of an error and even (perhaps in the near future) able to snap and clone prior to installation of packages and a roll back of the complete group if it turns out to have mucked up the system.  This concept would be a great addition to something like iPkgTool.
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