From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Mar 24 13:57:10 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id NAA21972 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 24 Mar 1995 13:57:10 -0800 Received: from gndrsh.aac.dev.com (gndrsh.aac.dev.com [198.145.92.241]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id NAA21965 for ; Fri, 24 Mar 1995 13:57:05 -0800 Received: (from rgrimes@localhost) by gndrsh.aac.dev.com (8.6.8/8.6.6) id NAA05339; Fri, 24 Mar 1995 13:56:49 -0800 From: "Rodney W. Grimes" Message-Id: <199503242156.NAA05339@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> Subject: Re: DEC Alpha Multia (fwd) To: julian@tfs.com (Julian Elischer) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 1995 13:56:49 -0800 (PST) Cc: terry@cs.weber.edu, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com In-Reply-To: from "Julian Elischer" at Mar 24, 95 01:34:44 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1697 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk ... > 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