Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 12:56:36 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: "Duane H. Hesser" <dhh@androcles.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD kernel as a replacement for Linux kernel Message-ID: <1956.959284596@localhost> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 25 May 2000 09:42:51 PDT." <XFMail.000525094251.dhh@androcles.com>
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> Anyone remember the old Pyramid OSX 'universe' command?
Yes, I do. It was very evil. :)
The way Apollo solved this problem was much more elegant and general
purpose and one of my favorite soapbox topics: Variant symlinks.
Rather than using the "universe" concept for getting at a different
command set, Apollo gave you the ability to expand variable names
inside of symlinks, e.g. "ln -s /bin.${OSTYPE} /bin" would cause
/bin to point to /bin.sysv if OSTYPE=sysv or /bin.bsd if OSTYPE=bsd.
Using that, you could create something very similar to a Pyramid
dual-universe environment with the added bonus of also being able to
use it for localization purposes, selecting different documentation
sets, whatever.
Of course, every time we've had this discussion in the past, people
usually jump in and say that the environment variable space is
insufficiently powerful for this and what we really need is something
more like VMS logical names where you can have system-wide, group-wide
and user-specific variables which then are applied to the variant
symlink expansion.
At that point, everyone generally agrees that it's too hard to do and
we should put off the entire concept for another couple of years. :)
- Jordan
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