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Date:      Sun, 5 Nov 2006 03:18:47 -0500
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers2.e313df@mired.org>
To:        Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, xdivac02@stud.fit.vutbr.cz, bu7cher@yandex.ru, joel@FreeBSD.org, jwd@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Yet another magic symlinks implementation 
Message-ID:  <17741.40551.489511.604335@bhuda.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <E1GgcDO-000BOk-19@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il>
References:  <454C55BD.000003.22283@webmail11.yandex.ru> <17741.9196.102826.208010@bhuda.mired.org> <E1GgcDO-000BOk-19@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il>

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In <E1GgcDO-000BOk-19@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il>, Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> typed:
> > In <454C55BD.000003.22283@webmail11.yandex.ru>, Andrey V. Elsukov <bu7cher@yandex.ru> typed:
> > > Hi, All!
> > > 
> > > I've ported NetBSD magic symlinks implementation to FreeBSD.
> > > The description of magiclinks can been found here:
> > > http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/symlink.7.html
> > 
> > This kind of thing has been showing up in Unix variants for a couple
> > of decades, but none have have ever caught on. Can you provide some
> > examples of what this is being used for?
> > 
> > It's not clear the the thing that it looks to me like it would be most
> > useful for is possible. That would be making various lib directories
> > on 64bit platforms that supported 32bit binaries point to either lib32
> > or lib64, depending on which mode the process was running in. It
> > doesn't look like @emul gets set for that, and the docs say that
> > @machine_arch depensd are the results of a uname invocation, which I
> > wouldn't expect to change based on the mode of the process.
> agree,
> btw, am/am-utils has most (maybe more) of this magics/semantics, and
> it is available on many different unix flavours, thus making it
> ideal for this kind of things, imho.

Yeah, sharing things between platforms of different types seems to be
the most useful thing the current set of variables can be used
for. Most of them on a single machine won't change short of a kernel
install, so they could replace fixed symlinks that get set at install
time, if they exist.

The @domainname and/or @hostname might be useful if your machine moves
between a fixed set of domains. It might take hacking dhclient to make
sure those get set *before* it writes /etc/resolv.conf to be really
useful, though. But this is pure speculation; OSX's superresolver is a
better solution to the problems I have in that area.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.



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