Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!wupost!bigboy.sbc.com!news.mtholyoke.edu!news.byu.edu!ns.novell.com!gateway.univel.com!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry
From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: A challenge to all true kernel hackers - conditional symlinks.
Message-ID: <1993Mar17.205308.5672@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <C3qzvC.2ps@bcstec.ca.boeing.com> <1993Mar17.000717.12690@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <C40vy4.2D0@agora.rain.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 20:53:08 GMT
Lines: 38
In article <C40vy4.2D0@agora.rain.com> rgrimes@agora.rain.com (Rodney Grimes) writes:
>terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
>>The other fact, that the name space is only polluted for names beginning
>>with "$(" means that collisoin is unlikely anyway, so the pollution is
>>not disenfranchising "$", "(", and ")" as filename characters, but is
>>instead diasallowing "$(" file names only.
>
>Not quite the whole story, if I remeber correctly from my apollo days,
>if a variant link portion ie NAME in $(NAME) does not corresponde
>to a valid environment variable it is left untranslated. So in
>fact you can have a link foo -> $(BAR) that well get to file $(BAR)
>as long as no environment variabled named BAR is defined.
My take on this would be to translate it to nothing. This is what both
the shell and make do with undefined environment variables that are
used in an expansion.
The idea is not necessarily to mimic the Apollo (if mimicry were called
for, I'd pick the NeXT), but to provide something that promotes ease of
use in a distributed environment. Host, OS, and language dependencies
coded into symbolic links are one tack to achieve this goal... perhaps
not optimal, but something fun to play with.
Has anyone heard from Martin Renters about the hard drive less boot
disk he was working on lately?
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have an 8 user poetic license" - me
Get the 386bsd FAQ from agate.berkeley.edu:/pub/386BSD/386bsd-0.1/unofficial
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------