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Date:      Sat, 25 Mar 1995 11:32:27 +0100 (MET)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD hackers)
Subject:   Re: env-dependant symlinks [Was: DEC Alpha Multia (fwd)]
Message-ID:  <199503251032.LAA12525@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <23776.796085665@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Mar 24, 95 02:54:25 pm

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As Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> 
> The main problem is getting access to the environment from the namei()
> code.  getenv/putenv all manipulate a malloc'd region in the process
> context and there's not even a handle on it that's easy to get to from
> the system.  You figure that out and the expanion should be trivial!

What's wrong with the approach to make this all in userland?

I've seen this on Data General's DG/UX.  They do have so-called
``elinks'', i.e. symlinks starting with the string "elink:".  They are
used to switch between different software development environments,
and they made their development tools (cc, as, ld, nm, ar) aware of
them, and resolve the paths there.  Other tools can easily made aware
of them, too (including scripts), by simply looking what the links
points to, and resolving it in their own context.

A typical elink there is (written from mind, need not be exact):

crt0.o -> \
elink:/${SDEROOT:-usr}/sde/${TARGET_BINARY_INTERFACE:-m88kdgux}/usr/lib/crt0.o

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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