From owner-freebsd-libh  Wed Nov  1 10:50:54 2000
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Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 10:50:20 -0800
From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>
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To: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
Cc: Patrick Bihan-Faou <patrick@mindstep.com>,
	"Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, libh@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Making the Packages System Better
References: <21943.973069819@winston.osd.bsdi.com>
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Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> 
> > the approach that has been described is sound. However I would also like to
> > hear about the arguments of people who oppose this. Maybe there is something
> > that we missed and that will byte us badly at some point ?
> 
> There are a number of more complex packages which "find" themselves by
> examining argv[0] (or $0 if, more typically, they're scripts which
> front-end executables which require significant environmental
> pollution to run).  These packages are often confused by finding their
> base to be a symlink and will do parent-directory (..) relative path
> smashing to find their other bits.  If this fails to work, you're
> hosed.
> 
> These "complex packages" are also not very rare - both emacs 20.x as
> well as java come immediately to mind, and there are others.
> 
> - Jordan

Later JDK releases are symlink-aware and do not have this problem.
(I know for a fact that the native JDK 1.2.2 is symlink-aware.
The Blackdown Linux JDK 1.2.2 is also symlink-aware, so I think
it's a fix that's been incorporated in Sun's sources, not just
a FreeBSD-specific fix.)

There's also a stock workaround that should work for any such program:

$ cd /usr/packages/emacs-20.35
$ mkdir bin-private
$ mv bin/emacs bin-private/emacs
$ cd bin
$ cat >emacs
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/packages/emacs-20.35/bin-private/emacs "$@"
^D
$ chmod +x emacs

Now, a symlink from /usr/packages/bin/emacs to
/usr/packages/emacs-20.35/bin/emacs will invoke this
shell script which will exec the "real" emacs with
all of the expected path information.

Gee, Jordan, I think even you could automate this one. ;-)

				- Tim


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