Re: /@USER@/bin ( was Re: Latest stuff )

[nick@nsis.cl.nec.co.jp (Gavin Thomas Nicol) writes:]

>Besides all this, I'm not 100% sure that Andy meant that all binaries
>would live under /vandys/bin. Andy, would you like to clarify why
>you'd like this feature added?

Wow, something really got lost in the translation. I was simply giving
an example of how to expand environment variables in pathname lookup.
My example had *nothing* to do with how I thought /bin and bin path
lookup should be handled. Clearly, I used a bad example.

Plan9 assumed that all sources of binaries would be merged (using union
mounts) into /bin, so your shell's "path" would always simply be /bin.
Currently, our shells still have UNIX-style command lookup, with a PATH
variable. This does not make Plan9-style setups impossible; merely use
a union mount and leave PATH as /bin.

Remember, in VSTa mount points are merely an illusion of the C library.
Neither servers nor the kernel know about mount points. Therefore, if we
choose some "standard" directory layout, it is trivial for any user or
any program to remap the name space to another format. This doesn't mean
we shouldn't pick some intelligent defaults, but it adds some perspective.
We have broken from UNIX (mount points are global), QNX (also global) and
Plan9 (per-process, but kernel-implemented), and we don't seem to have
lost much in the process.

                                                Andy
Received on Fri Oct 1 08:41:49 1993