A thought about the $PATH and the GNU Tools in OpenSolaris

Quicksearch

Disclaimer

The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Navigation

< links for 2009-07-22 | Monitoring a Solaris system with your iPhone >

A thought about the $PATH and the GNU Tools in OpenSolaris

Wednesday, July 22. 2009

I wasn´t really a friend of the decision to put the GNU tools in front of the native Solaris tools by setting the PATH accordingly in OpenSolaris 200x.y. I leaned more to the solution of having a seperate PATH, an additional entry in standards(5) and keeping the old default.

I´m still not a fan of this. But i´m starting to believe, that this decision was the correct decision. One of the objectives of OpenSolaris 200x.y was to ease the adoption of Solaris for Linux people. In the last few weeks, i´ve made an observation by having a twitter search of Solaris: Almost all people doesn´t criticize the kernel, the are just annoyed by missing command line arguments in the tool in comparison to their known Linux tools. Those critic even rised even for commands, where a GNU alternative is available unter /usr/sfw/bin. From this point, the decision to make the GNU tools standard is a reasonable one, you don´t have to like it, but hey ... you can still use Solaris Classic

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Solaris at 18:48 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (2)

Defined tags for this entry: solaris

Related entries by tags:

View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Opensolinux
Laut c0t0d0s0 hat Sun in OpenSolaris endlich das Licht gesehen: GNU Tools, so sie installiert sind, stehen vorne im $PATH, wenn ich das richtig verstanden habe. Das bedeutet, daß sich ein Solaris bei installierten Standardprogrammen auch standardkonform f

Weblog: Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp
Tracked: Jul 22, 19:12

Da ist er wieder, der Linux Standard
Jörg Möllenkamp schreibt in einem Artikel[1] darüber, das die GNU Tools nun in OpenSolaris den Sun eigenen Tools vorangestellt werden, was faktisch einer Ablösung der originalen Befehle durch die GNU Toolchain nahe kommt. Er meint, d...

Weblog: cptsalek.twoday.net
Tracked: Jul 22, 23:09

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Well I still think that this is a step into the wrong direction.
Software should be portable and OpenSolaris is targeted on developers. So assuming that on every OS out there a grep is a GNU grep is complete nonsense. Every programmer worth his salt should keep in mind that there are standards for a reason. And POSIX is the standard, like it or not. Of course you can use any GNU (or other tool) you like, but don't assume it on every system there is. And if setting up your $PATH is too complicated for you, then you shouldn't code anyway.

#1 audax on 2009-07-22 19:48 (Reply)

It's a good way of selling Solaris. The Linux-Fan-Boys get their GNU-Pampers and the Old-Style-Solaris-Die-Hards know how to set $PATH.

#2 Knut Grunwald (Homepage) on 2009-07-23 14:11 (Reply)

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/presentations/linuxtage2009_graz/linuxtage_graz_2009.pdf

S. 44 ff.

"Warum nutzt Sun nicht einfach die GNU Binaries direkt im Pfad?"

"Es gibt zwei heilige Kühe in Solaris:
Binärkompatibilitätsgarantie Sourcecodekompatibilitätsgarantie"

"auch Scripte sind irgendwie Binaries ;)"

Naja, irgendwann landet halt jede Kuh mal beim Schlachter

#2.1 Anon Ymous on 2009-07-23 14:56 (Reply)

Ah ... das hat ja echt lange gedauert ... habe damit eigentlich schon gestern gerechnet. Deswegen sind die alten Binaries and den alten Stellen noch da. Aus $PATH entfernen, schon laeufts .... is halt wie in standards() beschrieben

Die heilige Kuh ist also immer noch da ...

#2.1.1 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2009-07-23 15:48 (Reply)

mal die alten Zöpfe abschneiden muss ja nichts schlechtes sein, ich würde mir z.B. wünschen das der i386 support von OpenSolaris eingestellt wird und nur noch 64bit CPUs unterstützt werden...

und zu den ganzen legacy Anwendungen, Solaris hat doch ein nettes Feature namens Zones, warum nicht Sol8/9/10 Zones für diese Anwendungen bereitstellen und dafür OpenSolaris ein bisschen ausmisten?

#2.1.1.1 Anon Ymous on 2009-07-23 20:34 (Reply)

Die Zonen sind sicher eine gute Idee für die Kapselung von Altanwendungen, aber manchmal möchte man ja auch die Neuerungen von Solaris nutzen.

#2.1.1.1.1 Knut Grunwald (Homepage) on 2009-07-24 15:08 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry