On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 10:21 PM, Reginald Beardsley <[email protected]> wrote: > > So *when* do they disappear? That's the question I'm raising. What are > criteria for acceptable links? Why are user & site level customizations > cluttering a general distribution image? > > I'm concerned about the proliferation. 15715 symlinks is a lot of links. I > don't see any sign of discipline. Do we really need a symlink in /usr/sbin > to everything in /sbin? Setting PATH properly is much cleaner.
Setting PATH is of no use whatsoever to scripts that have used the full path to a command. That's commonly been promoted as good practice. Besides, almost all of those symlinks don't hit the PATH at all. The ones that do are likely necessary to avoid things breaking and to allow commands to be found without excessive effort. But most by number are in /usr/share/icons followed by /usr/share/man. Then /usr/lib, and in many cases that is links from the unversioned library name to the versioned one. The number of symlinks for commands that you could actually clean up is likely to be a negligible fraction of the whole; I don't see a major problem here. (Although deciding what the structure of the namespace ought to be certainly does merit some thought. I know I'm not especially keen on the dump it all in one pot and hope for the best strategy.) -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
