[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI boot problem

[Gregory Youngblood]

Gary Generous wrote:
The problem is always legacy stuff.  If you change the behaviors then 
expect that things that people wrote for Solaris to fail.  For example, 
napp-it, webmin, etc.

The only acceptable solution for me is to put all the Linux compatible 
stuff somewhere and let the sysadmin decide whether he wants to put that first in the PATH.)
....................

This seems the sanest. Personally I do not think the default behavior should be changed to placate linux,  mac, or anyone else at the expense of Solaris compatibility. 

Many years ago, 2.4 I think, one of my projects was building full set of gnu and other non Solaris tools that were ultimately mounted on all machines. Users could then adjust their own path and environment to have those appear first and get different results. This also meant scripts counting on Solaris or gnu tools had to either modify the path of most often include full paths to each tool to make sure the correct version would run. 

I think the same should work here. 

Perhaps going a bit further, at install time the user could select a linux compatibility mode of sorts that would put the appropriate dirs in the path first, along with the reminder that tools and scripts expecting Solaris behaviors may break as a result. A quick & simple personality tool could switch path order for the user when that occurs. 

Of course this will require a lot of extra work to build into a system, at least beyond what /usr/gnu already has, and I think there are many other areas that need attention first. Definitely think this or something similar should get stuck on a to do somewhere though. 
 
Greg

Sent from my Droid Incredible.