Re: union mounts

On Fri, Nov 06, 1998 at 04:25:52PM -0800, Andy Valencia wrote:
> >i find that almost as useful as per-process namespace.
>
> That's the claim I heard from Plan 9 in particular, but in practice I've
> never used it much at all. For instance, Plan 9's shell only looks at /bin,
> and you're expected to union things into it. But in practice, all shells
> (even the freeware "rc" clone) use a PATH concept. Still, it's there, and
> works (delta any bit rot).

I find this an interesting concept considering that modern shells walk
your 'path' and bring everything into an in-memory hash table
anyhow. What's the big win of doing a union bin?

In my own UNIX installations, I've moved in completely the opposite
directions, all packages are encapsulated in their own directories. On
superior shells (like zsh) I just manually add entries into the path
hash table. I don't have a /usr/local/bin.

This allows me to have lots of versions of the same things installed,
and allows me to be more aware of command line naming conflicts.

home:/usr/local/encap> ls -F
INSTALLED
apache_1.2.5.encap/
catdoc-0.33.encap/
communicator-v405.encap/
encapper-1.3.encap/
ezmlm.encap/
fvwm-2.0.46.encap/
fvwm95-2.0.43b.encap/
gdbm-1.7.3.encap/
ie-4.encap/
ie4_0.encap.old/
lynx-2.8.encap/
mswordview-0.0.14.encap/
mutt-0.90.2.encap/
mutt-0.92.1.encap/
mutt-0.92.1p.encap/
mutt-0.94.13.encap/
mutt.encap/
mysql-3.21.19b.encap/
ncftp-3.0b1.encap/
patch-2.5.encap/
perl5.004_04.encap/
rxvt-2.4.6.encap/
samba-1.9.18p7.encap/
tcp_wrappers-7.6.encap/
xbuffy3.3.encap/
xemacs-20.4/
xpm-3.4k.encap/
ytalk-3.2.encap/
zsh-3.1.2-zefram4.encap/

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske_at_chat.net