Re: [RFC] User Accesable Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
Scripsit Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch>
> On Sunday 28 March 2004 06.17, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > Most computers who have more than one user to share data between
> > tend to have *many* users, so one would quickly want a way to
> > share software between smaller sets of users
> There could be group home direcories, aligned along unix groups. Anything
> else, I guess, is pretty much unsolvable, users would just have to massage
> their $PATH manually, I guess with a proper configuration tool this should
> not be a problem even for novice users.
One might reasonably hope that OSes and software authors could agree
on providing a standard way for users to set up themselves as users of
such tertiary roots.
When I was at the University of Copenhagen, I maintaned a "local root"
tree for our research group. It turned out that there are many more
environment variables than just PATH to deal with. We needed to set
MANPATH, INFOPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, C_INCLUDE_PATH, XFILESEARCHPATH,
EMACSLOADPATH, ... for each user.
Perhaps the best forward-looking solution would be to invent a new
catch-all variable, say $ROOTS, and encourage every other package that
interprets a ${FOOPATH} variable to support a common syntax meaning,
"try $X/share/foo for every X in $ROOTS".
--
Henning Makholm "Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit."
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