[csw-maintainers] Bugreport on alternatives with NFS-shared /opt/csw

[Philip Brown]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Tue Mar 23 11:56:36 -0400 2010:
>
>> How about you refer our customer to the code, reference my email
>> suggestions here, and say to him, "sorry I dont have much time, but
>> if you would like to fix the code so that it works this other way
>> instead, that would be acceptible".
>
> Indicating that, of course, patches would need to be accepted upstream
> so they're not a constant burden on us going forward?


Why would we need to ever "upgrade" from upstream? We grabbed the code
because the current code, meets our current needs. We do not have a
need to "track upstream" with it.
(just as we grabbed GAR. we dont "track upstream" with that. just the opposite)

We have what we need. We can consider what we have a "fork", if we
wish. There is no "going forward" burden.



> I also don't think the current implementation is actually broken,
> btw.  It may be broken wrt to running it in conjunction with NFS
> shared directories and zones,...

What you seem to be saying is, "well, it works for my purposes, so I
reject your notion of a bug, even though I know exactly what you're
saying and can reproduce the problem. I Just Dont Care. ".

This is canonical "bad software writer behaviour", btw.

It is clearly possible to fix this. It's just a matter of who is
willing to spend the time to do so.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time either :(
To say "no time", is one thing. But to claim "not broken", is just not
appropriate.


> but in Linux-land (where it originated),
> this isn't a problem.  (I've yet to see shared binaries on NFS in
> Linux...could happen, obviously, but I don't think it's common.)

yeah, 'cause NFS on linux sux :)
(or at least, it's legendary for it)



> Having everything 'bounced' through a single alternatives/ directory
> gives a nice place to see where _all_ alternatives are pointing.

You still get that "feature", if you simply save the information in
another form there.

Heck, I woiuld guess you could save it in the SAME form!
Keep the links in /etc/opt/csw/blah exactly the way they are now. but
link the actual usable path to the same place. ie:

ln -s /opt/csw/bin/myfave  /etc/opt/csw/alternatives/whatever/opt/csw/bin/editor

ln -s /opt/csw/bin/myfave  /opt/csw/bin/editor