Re: union mounts

On Fri, Nov 06, 1998 at 06:05:14PM -0800, David Jeske wrote:
> 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?

Coz then you don't have to complicate the shell with PATH and
caching nonsense. Plus one doesn't have to do screwy things with
mounts if you have clients with different architectures.

[xxx 'encapsulation']
> 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.

This is an advantage? Seems the road to madness, with the possibilities
of different header, log or data file formats with misc. versions floating
around. Plus it gets icky quickly if multiple architectures must be
supported.

Just 2/c,

Eric Dorman
edorman@ucsd.edu
Received on Sat Nov 7 09:14:42 1998