[OpenIndiana-discuss] Namespace management and symlinks in /usr

[Udo Grabowski (IMK)]

On 17/10/2012 16:50, Reginald Beardsley wrote:
> In chasing the Firefox/Java issue, I happened to look at the symlinks in /usr.  I'm rather disturbed by what I find.
>
> There are 15715 in my installation of oi_151a.
 > ...
> Yes, it is painful to force people to fix their scripts, but in the end, indulging bad behavior just makes the problem worse.
 > Having written scripts that ran cleanly across Ultrix, SunOS, AIX, HPUX, Irix 
and more I know it's not hard to do things w/o
 > resorting to polluting the system namespace w/ bandaids.
>

This is for people running heterogenous systems, like old Osol
combined with new OI, or for people upgrading from Osol to OI
for not having trouble with scripts after upgrade, and problems
with configure setups for software (on solaris you usually have
to patch configure scripts, and it's a pain to redo this on
every upgrade). So having these symlinks is a good thing, and
when these old systems gradually die away, people will adapt
their scripts, but at least up to the next stable release of
OI these links should be kept. As there's usually not much left in
these legacy directories, they will quickly become a simple
symlink to the default places.
-- 
Dr.Udo Grabowski    Inst.f.Meteorology a.Climate Research IMK-ASF-SAT
www-imk.fzk.de/asf/sat/grabowski/ www.imk-asf.kit.edu/english/sat.php
KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology            http://www.kit.edu
Postfach 3640,76021 Karlsruhe,Germany  T:(+49)721 608-26026 F:-926026