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Date:      Fri, 3 Nov 2000 14:35:03 +0000
From:      Jonathan Perkin <sketchy@netcraft.com>
To:        libh@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Making the Packages System Better
Message-ID:  <20001103143503.B94079@netcraft.com>

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Talking about symlinks and stuff

[snip]

Just to say this has already been done, and I know quite a few people
who use it on their linux systems.

http://encap.cso.uiuc.edu/

Known as the encap package manager, it uses a userland tool "epkg" to
manage the symlinks etc.  Quite nifty, but I side with DES in that the
symlinks get annoying after a while - basic stuff like viewing file
permissions is impractical as you have to follow symlinks first just
to get to the file.  Debian's /etc/alternatives system is even worse:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           20 Sep 27 10:32 /usr/bin/vi -> /etc/alternatives/vi
$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/vi
rwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           12 Sep 29 17:06 /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/nvi
$ ls -l /usr/bin/nvi
-rwxr-xr-x    3 root     root       315248 Mar 26  2000 /usr/bin/nvi

3 commands just to get basic file perms?  I can see a *lot* of people
hating that very quickly.

-- 
  Jonathan Perkin  <sketchy@netcraft.com>  Voice: +44 (01225) 404422
ech`echo xiun | tr nu oc | sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol
 System Administrator - Netcraft, Bath, UK - http://www.netcraft.com/


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