[cfarm-users] rsync on AIX?

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Mon, 19 Aug 2024 at 02:44, David Edelsohn <dje.gcc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > The intent is to keep the AIX installation pure so that it behaves like a normal AIX system -- for better or worse.  It's the only way to ensure that anything tested on the system behaves consistently for any normal user of a package tested on the system.
>> >
>> > The AIX OSS team have made an effort to segregate official AIX supported packages and commands from FOSS packages and commands.  There are some commands, like tar, sed, make, that conflict, and there are other commands where AIX is trying to ensure that customers don't assume an incorrect level of support because a command is in the normal AIX system namespace.
>>
>> That makes perfect sense. Perhaps, instead of adding things from /opt
>> to the default path, or symlinks from /opt to /usr, it could be
>> entertained
>> to add more harmony for what /opt/ and especially /opt/freeware
>> contain, without adding those things to the PATH. That way users who
>> want
>> to treat the cfarm machines uniformly could just depend on things
>> being in /opt/freeware, and on linux systems, the things installed on
>> the system
>> can be just symlinked to /opt/freeware?
>
>
> IBM AIX OSS organization specifically has chosen minimal symlinks.  you can look in /usr/bin and see symlinks for bzip, flex, screen, and zip, but they didn't choose to do that for rsync.  I have notified them.  But I'm not going to make cfarm119 gratuitously different from a standard AIX install because then it's one more and one more and pretty soon something that works on cfarm119 doesn't work in the rest of the world.

Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting that cfarm119 is modified in any
way. I'm suggesting that the non-AIX systems, the linux systems, in
the cfarm
are changed so that they have /opt/freeware that has contents similar
to the ones on AIX. That way
A) we achieve the goal of having a pristine AIX system, and users of
it can choose to use the freeware tools that they need
B) the same freeware tools can be used on non-AIX too, and there would
be a common toolset across different systems

Considering the general (lack of) portability across different unixen,
that pipe dream might not work. But it's perhaps more feasible
than attempting to solve (B) by means that would make the AIX system
non-pristine.