Date: Fri, 24 Mar 1995 13:56:49 -0800 (PST) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> To: julian@tfs.com (Julian Elischer) Cc: terry@cs.weber.edu, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: DEC Alpha Multia (fwd) Message-ID: <199503242156.NAA05339@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <m0rsH0G-0003weC@TFS.COM> from "Julian Elischer" at Mar 24, 95 01:34:44 pm
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...
> I think a LITES/FreeBSD effort would be neat, then you could run the OSF1
> server as wel and FreeBSD and NetBSD and other servers.. :)
>
> talking of such things..
>
> I've been thinking of adding a switch to allow
> environment usage when interetting symbolic links..
> (in namei/lookup)
> I see that LITES already has this..
> what it the thought on this?
>
> I like the idea of
> /usr/$OS/bin etc.
This has come up on and off over the last 2 years, many of us would
really like to see this. (I know Jordan and I are 2 that would!)
There are several commercial implentations that do support this,
and the best model, IMHO, that I have seen yet is Apollo's Aegis/Domain OS
implementation.
To go along with it you really want a more
generalized logical name translation table so that you don't get
environment variable name space pollution (though I have never seen
this as a problem on Domain/OS).
Let us not have all the discussion about file name space polution
we have had in the past. I can prove this not to be an issue, and
since julian said ``adding a switch to allow'' those that don't like
it can turn it off!
Apollo uses the scheme that ${somevar} translates into the value of
the environment variable somevar if and only if it is defined. If
it is *not* defined the value is left unchanged. This is an important
part that is often forgotten about.
You can also create read-only environment variable settings during
the boot process so users don't screw them selves by chaning certain
environment variables.
--
Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Accurate Automation Company Custom computers for FreeBSD
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