Use of /usr/ccs/bin on Solaris

[Martin Buchholz]

I support Magnus' strategy.

Slightly unrelated, /usr/ccs/bin is a very old directory, and ISTR that it
was slowly going away.

On SunOS 5.10 I see a cornucopia of nm's muddying the waters:
/usr/ccs/bin/sparcv9/nm
/usr/ccs/bin/nm
/usr/xpg4/bin/nm
/usr/sfw/sparc-sun-solaris2.10/bin/nm


On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Magnus Ihse Bursie <
magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com> wrote:

>
> > 6 mar 2015 kl. 20:17 skrev Dmitry Samersoff <dmitry.samersoff at oracle.com
> >:
> >
> > Magnus,
> >
> > You can add a generic warning:
> >
> > if configure fails finding some tools and it's solaris
> > then
> >  warn about /usr/ccs/bin that should be in a path
> > end
>
> This is exactly what I said would be technically hard to do. Much harder
> than what's justified for this issue.
>
> >
> > I'm against of altering PATH any way (appending or prepending anything)
> > because it might lead to the situation where wrong tool is picked and
> > it's hard to debug.
>
> I think we might just be misunderstanding each other here. Configure will
> not (and in fact cannot) alter the user's PATH in his/her environment.
>
> We do use the PATH as one way - but not the only way - to find tools
> needed to be able to build. One of the design goals of the configure script
> is "if the tool exist on the system, we should find it". This is to
> minimize the amount of configuration needed by the user.
>
> If you are worried that configure should find a tool that would work, but
> not be the exact version that you wanted, then you will have to point it
> out for configure, using eg. --with-devkit, --with-bootjdk, SED=, GREP= etc.
>
> So looking in /usr/ccs/bin instead of failing, is just like the rest of
> the processing configure does.
>
> /Magnus
>
> >
> > -Dmitry
> >
> >
> >
> >> On 2015-03-06 17:50, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> >>> On 2015-03-04 22:03, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> >>> I agree that configure should not mess with user's PATH and should
> >>> "auto-find" programs in /usr/ccs/bin only as a last resort.
> >>>
> >>> It would be reasonable, when configure fails on Solaris, to notice
> >>> that the
> >>> user does not have /usr/ccs/bin on PATH and suggest appending.
> >>
> >> I have opened https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8074557.
> >>
> >> Adding a warning to failed configure on Solaris due to missing build
> >> tools that presumably resides in /usr/ccs/bin seems like quite a lot of
> >> work.
> >>
> >> I suggest the following:
> >> Instead of prepending, append /usr/ccs/bin, so any binaries in the
> >> user's specified PATH are picked first. This will allow a properly set
> >> PATH to function, but it will still provide the "best effort" approach
> >> of configure to look in "well-known locations" for tools.
> >>
> >> Does that seem like an acceptable solution?
> >>
> >> /Magnus
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dmitry Samersoff
> > Oracle Java development team, Saint Petersburg, Russia
> > * I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the sources.
>