From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 25 12:53:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from zippy.cdrom.com (zippy.cdrom.com [204.216.27.228]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C682B37B72E for ; Thu, 25 May 2000 12:53:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) Received: from localhost (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zippy.cdrom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA01959; Thu, 25 May 2000 12:56:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com) To: "Duane H. Hesser" Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD kernel as a replacement for Linux kernel In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 25 May 2000 09:42:51 PDT." Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 12:56:36 -0700 Message-ID: <1956.959284596@localhost> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message