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.

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