Ross Vandegrift wrote:
>
> 1) The "feed a script to this program" was designed to work with SYSV
> style init scripts and there was fear of vendors starting to design
> programs that only took into account SYSV style of initialization.
BSD got many things right, it's true, but once in a while AT&T did
something right, too.
Let's turn this around: how would _you_ write a mechanism that would
allow an arbitrary package to add itself to a BSDish system's bootup
process without changing existing init scripts? That last condition's
important: programs that change existing scripts tend to be brittle:
they often break the scripts they change. The System V init script
method means you don't have to change existing scripts.
One other condition: you don't have the option of asking the user to
change their own init scripts to start the package. The track to world
domination doesn't allow it.
> of preference; I think it makes more sense to run
> /usr/local/enlightenment/bin/enlightenment than
> /usr/local/bin/enlightenment. This way, I install all of the software I
> compile into /usr/local/$(application name), and copy the shared libs to
> /usr/local/lib. This way, 'ls /usr/local' give a complete view of what I
> have installed, no package manager necessary.
1) Package managers are good. Whether you can get by without them is
not even an issue: people like them, so mainstream distros will offer
them, and therefore we might as well design for systems that use them.
2) The /usr/local/{package} scheme sounds a lot like "c:\Program Files"
to me. Unix's treatment of PATH versus Windows' is one of the many
reasons I prefer Unix. If you wanna turn Unix into Windows, grand, but
don't make me use it.
-- = Warren Young, maintainer of the Winsock Programmer's FAQ at: = http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/programming/winsock/ = = ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 23 2000 - 21:00:13 EST