On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 05:32:37PM +0000, Mathias Gibbens wrote: > I like that idea, thanks! It would be easy enough to add that to > Incus' $PATH while making it simple for an end user to modify their > local environment to directly use `mc` if they wish.
Let me express a concern regarding this route. If we modify $PATH (in packages or as an end user), that may subtly break other packages expecting a particular behavior. Let me sketch a few examples. 1. A user adds the minio path to their default shell. When the, mc.desktop launcher may now launch the minio thing instead of mc. 2. If Incus' $PATH is augmented, any tools run from Incus will also be affected by that change and may end up with an incompatible binary. I don't think the approach of augmenting the $PATH is a silver bullet here. Rather, it defers the problems to the end user where none of Debian's QA may have any effect. Stuff looks as if it were working, but the composed $PATH produces subtle breakage that is hard to diagnose. In the functional package manager world, this is less of a problem, because there executables tend to be hard coded using their full path. In principle, Debian could do the same, but then we loose the ability to add our own custom wrappers around existing tools to our $PATH. There is no silver bullet. Helmut
