From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jun 14 8:57:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from server.ghostgbtb.com (modem13.tekrab.net [208.30.20.213]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6D83015275 for ; Mon, 14 Jun 1999 08:57:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mrami@gbtb.com) Received: from localhost (mrami@localhost) by server.ghostgbtb.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with SMTP id LAA02905; Mon, 14 Jun 1999 11:57:31 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from mrami@gbtb.com) X-Authentication-Warning: server.ghostgbtb.com: mrami owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 11:57:31 -0400 (EDT) From: Marc Ramirez X-Sender: mrami@server.ghostgbtb.com To: Chuck Youse Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: symlink question In-Reply-To: <003001beb5f9$9b10b480$65e684ce@sloth.yousehouse.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, 13 Jun 1999, Chuck Youse wrote: > Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is meant by a "variant link", and > what might one be used for? In my fantasy world, a variant symlink is kind of a way of putting a search path into a symbolic link, so that if you had an environment variable E=a:b:c, and you had a symbolic link created with ln -s /some/where/\${E}/foo bar when you execute a command like more bar/baz.txt it would look for /some/where/a/foo/bax.txt, then /some/where/b/foo/baz.txt, then /some/where/c/foo/baz.txt. It's akin to what the unionfs tries to do, but it doesn't care about creating total transparency, and it doesn't mask directories, and changes to one process's search order don't affect other process's search orders, so you don't have to do all those machinations with loopback mounts and things like that. It's much more along the lines of VMS's logicals, if yoy know of those. As for uses, in my fantasy world, I personally would be using it for system testing where I have a rather large base system which gets modified per customer. "export CUSTOMER=foo; gosystem" would be so nice... Marc. > > Chuck Youse > Director of Systems > cyouse@cybersites.com > > -----Original Message----- > From: Marc Ramirez > To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG > Date: Sunday, June 13, 1999 1:12 PM > Subject: symlink question > > > > > >Sorry if I'm bothering you busy folk unnecessarily... > > > >If I wanted to add variant symlinks, would that just require modifications > >to namei, or is that way too simplistic? > > > >Thanks, > >Marc. > > > >-- > >Marc Ramirez - Owner Great Big Throbbing Brains > >mrami@gbtb.com http://www.gbtb.com > >Our brains throb, so yours won't have to! > > > > > > > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > >with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > -- Marc Ramirez - Owner Great Big Throbbing Brains mrami@gbtb.com http://www.gbtb.com Our brains throb, so yours won't have to! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message