[OmniOS-discuss] [discuss] pkgsrc-2013Q2 binary packages for illumos now available

[Jim Klimov]

Hello Jonathan,

   I was reading through your release notes (blog entry) here:
http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/whats-new-in-pkgsrc-2013Q2.html
and stumbled upon this bit of information:

   : Also on OmniOS 'od' is located in a different location
   $ sed -i -e 's,/usr/bin/od,/usr/gnu/bin/od,' /opt/local/bin/startx

   I believe (didn't try yet) that /opt/local/bin/startx is a script;
wouldn't it be more correct to have it handle setting the proper
environment - either as force-prepending its PATH defaults (and
not using full paths to commands), or perhaps defining variables
for the full paths to binaries?

   A pattern like this might be used for this particular example:



### Note we don't preset an OD="" so that one can be inherited from env
for F in /usr/bin/od /usr/gnu/bin/od ; do
	[ x"$OD" = x -a -x "$F" ] && OD="$F"
	### An ultimate test might be to try executing the program with
	### an expected zero-return, like "$OD < /dev/null > /dev/null"
	### to filter out broken binaries, missing dynamic libs, etc.
done
### The "which" command can be used to fall back to a binary in PATH:
[ x"$OD" = x ] && F="`which od`" && case "$F" in
	/*) [ -x "$F" ] && OD="$F" ;;
esac
### Sanity check: we have a good variable
[ x"$OD" = x -o ! -x "$OD" ] && \
	echo "ERROR: OD not available: '$OD'" >&2 && exit 1

This way you have your $OD set to a sane value, detection of which
you might further enhance by logic that would consider per-distro
nuances. And this would be a least-surprise (and less manual work)
for users on various platforms.

With some "eval" trickery this pattern can be turned into a shell
function (Bourne sh, bash, maybe others) to set the provided shell
variable to the matched one of provided binaries.

HTH,
//Jim Klimov