From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Jun 4 10:25:56 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from megaweapon.zigg.com (megaweapon.zigg.com [206.114.60.8]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1266114C3D for ; Fri, 4 Jun 1999 10:25:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from matt@zigg.com) Received: from localhost (matt@localhost) by megaweapon.zigg.com (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id NAA22366; Fri, 4 Jun 1999 13:25:31 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from matt@zigg.com) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 13:25:30 -0400 (EDT) From: Matt Behrens To: Narvi Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, "Rodney W. Grimes" , sthaug@nethelp.no, marquis@roble.com Subject: Re: SSH2 (in FreeBSD-Questions) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Narvi wrote: : > Well, why not do what I do -- I have /opt/packagename/bin, : > /opt/packagename/sbin, etc. and I simply do this after installing : > a package: : > cd /opt/bin;ln -s ../*/bin/* . : > Then we can just add /opt/bin to our paths. We still keep things : > nice and separate, and if we want to clean up dead symlinks, we : > just do rm /usr/bin/* then rerun the symlink generator. Oops, I meant /opt/bin/*; /usr/bin/* isn't such a bright idea :-) : You conviniently overlooked the matter of shared libraries. And other : shared files. And manual pages. And... : : Of course you could have dummy directories full of links for these all. : But that is getting to *WAY* too many symlinks. "Conveniently"? I'll ignore that little shot and take the rest of what you say at face value. I'm not trying to start a flame war here. First of all, shared library directories are already full of mostly symlinks; especially the non-system ones such as /usr/local/lib. Besides, it's not as if the system needs to look up the library every time it makes a function call. Or with every time you hit the space bar to see the next screenful in the manpage you're looking at. I've been using the same symlink scheme with /opt/lib and /opt/man/man? for some time and it hasn't hurt one bit, except maybe with a few extra directory entries here and there. Admittedly, I've only had time to patch ten or so packages to work with this scheme, since regrettably a lot of stuff comes out of the box with an inflexible scheme. (pine absolutely made me cringe.) But I'm toying with reworking a few of them, since I've saved patchfiles, to work with a more flexible scheme where the preferred layout can be specified before compiling in a way similar to configure options but more flexibly and perhaps with an option to read an /etc/path.conf file or something similar. Mind you, I'm not forcing anyone to accept my particular scheme. I just think it would be nice if packages came out of the tarball supporting this sort of thing a little more readily. And some people may find these ideas, and the knowledge that they can work, useful. Matt Behrens Owner/Administrator, zigg.com Chief Engineer, Nameless IRC Network To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message