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

[Gregory S. Youngblood]

I took a different approach to do something very similar. I used an env file where all the executable locations were defined and also built a few aliases. I then used uname to detect the os and source the appropriate file. Wrapped that in a single file something so my scripts started with ". ~/bin/loadenvexes.sh" and I was good to go. Worked well across sol/osol/oi, Mac, and several flavors of Linux.

--
Sent from my Jelly Bean Galaxy Nexus

Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
>--- On Wed, 10/17/12, Udo Grabowski (IMK) <udo.grabowski at kit.edu> wrote:
>
>> From: Udo Grabowski (IMK) <udo.grabowski at kit.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Namespace management and symlinks in /usr
>> To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
>> Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2012, 10:11 AM
>> 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.
>
>To paraphrase your response:
>"
>"These links are good because they keep people from having to fix badly written scripts.
>
>When there are more symlinks people will fix their scripts."
>
>It's been my observation that rather than fix the badly written scripts, they just write more badly written scripts and the problem gets worse rather than better.
>
>The following *really* isn't a lot of work the first time, and it's easy to fix when it does break.  When I was writing scripts that needed to run across 6 distinct flavors of Unix, I had a boilerplate file I placed at the start of the scripts to handle all this stuff.   Typically took about 10-15 minutes to update all the path information for a new platform and that was for a version control and build system I wrote.
>
>if [ -e /usr/sfw/bin/fubar ]
>   then
>   FUBAR=/usr/sfw/bin/fubar
>
>elif [ -e /usr/bin/fubar ]
>   then
>   FUBAR=/usr/bin/fubar
>
>else
>   echo "Can't find fubar"
>   exit
>
>fi
>
>
>As for ./configure,  setting PATH properly will take care of most of those.  The ones it won't fix generally can't be fixed.
>
>Reg
>
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