Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 16:18:44 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Variant Link implementation, continued Message-ID: <v04011718b1c04403264f@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <13617.899298865@time.cdrom.com> References: Your message of "Wed, 01 Jul 1998 10:49:55 %2B0200." <199807010849.KAA25121@surf.IAE.nl>
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At 6:14 AM -0700 7/1/98, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: >> I've had some discussion with Terry about this, and one of the "options" >> would be to include the *env pointer into the u-area, such that we know >> where the user keeps his env. > > Well, just don't forget that the setenv() code in libc can change the > value of environ at any time with a realloc(), so if you're going > to copy it into the u_area you're also going to have to keep this copy > in sync unless you also had plans on replacing environ. :) My initial reaction is that I wouldn't want links to depend on values in environment variables. If I setup some "clean environment" for a program I'm exec-ing, I'm not going to think to copy values which are important for these links to work. So there's two questions. One is how to you make sure you're looking at the correct & current environment, and the other is how do you know that that environment (once you find it) includes all the symbolic- link-related variables (and values) which will be expected. I'd put the variables used in symbolic links somewhere else, some new place. I just don't see symbolic links as being something which would or should be quite as dynamic as user-level environment variables. It just seems to me that symbolic links are "lower level" than the environment values for the active user-level program. Just my 2 cents on the idea. Note that my thinking may be influenced by the fact that I'm used to working with AFS's @sys variable. I keep thinking how easy it would be for a user to happen to pick a simple name like "sys" for an environment variable in some script, and what absolute havoc that would cause if they did it in our filesystem setup... --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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