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From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
Message-Id: <199806060550.WAA29701@usr08.primenet.com>
Subject: Re: lorder problem: aout vs. elf (and GNU Configure problem too)
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Sat, 6 Jun 1998 05:50:49 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, ache@nagual.pp.ru, peter@netplex.com.au,
        current@FreeBSD.ORG, ports@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <3555.897110276@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jun 5, 98 10:17:56 pm
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> > My gut feeling would be to put variant symbolic links in, and use a
> > dollarsign ("$") to designate a kernel variant keyword:
> > 
> > ln -s "/usr/lib.\${\$imgact}" /usr/lib
> 
> Yuck.  That's gross and you know it's gross, so I won't even try to
> argue the point.  Why the gratuitous complication?  Just accept $foo
> or ${foo} as the usual convention and, if you're absolutely dead-set
> against having the kernel grub around in the user's actual environment
> for this information, have it look in a logical name table someplace
> with a new sysctl()'ish API for frobbing it.

The backslash has to do with the double quotes (as opposed to using
single quote).

> Too bad sysctl(8)
> doesn't allow one to add new variables dynamically when the system is
> up, you could even use sysctl for this one.

I wanted to make it so you could avoid the escape.  If it's not an issue
(I have a damn hard time finding an example of a legacy implementation
that depends on it... I suspect there are none), then making the escape
non-transparent is a better method.

This was sort of a preemptive strike against people who would bitch on
principle rather than fact... we know who we are... 8-).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.

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