Re: hurd does NOT need /hurd
On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 02:31:56PM +0200, Emile van Bergen wrote:
> On Mon, 20 May 2002, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 08:13:37PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 02:41:19AM +0200, Wolfgang J?hrling wrote:
> > > > Of course you do, because you don't understand what /hurd is about. It
> > > > is about the Hurd server binaries, which are started by users and should
> > > > not be hidden in a directory like /lib/you/cant/find/me/.
> > >
> > > So they should be in /bin?
> >
> > No, because they should not be in the PATH. As I have said before:
> >
> > 'You don't want them to be visible in /bin because running them on the
> > command line the normal way fails with "Must be started as translator."'
>
> I think that's a very feeble reason. Either you say that the image is
> intended to be ran by users (in a particular way), or you say users
> aren't responsible enough to decide when and how they want to run it --
> but you can't have it both ways at once.
You are thinking Unix. GNU is not Unix.
PATH is the thing your shell looks in if it sees an unqualified program
name on the start of the command line to run.
It is not useful for a translator to be in the PATH because it does not
do a lot of useful things when run this way. Because this is not how
translators are intended to be invoked.
> Look at this. A lot of programs that reside in /bin make no sense to
> users who do not know how to run them, i.e. who do not know what
> arguments (or prefix, in your case settrans) to supply. But they still
> are in /bin
There is quite a difference between choosing the right arguments and
invoking a program through settrans. Give another example where a
large set of programs in /bin can only be run meaningfully by putting
them into a special (non-Unixish) environment.
> In other words, what you seem to advocate for is a sort of
> /bin-but-just-not-in-PATH,
This is not what I am advocating.
> So, *nix only has programs you can run, and IMHO the distinction is kind
> of moot. I think /bin is an excellent place, and possibly you could
> change the ELF loader for those programs from /lib/ld.so to
> /bin/ld.settrans, and make the new settrans take and remove its own
> arguments from the argv supplied to the translator. This may be a wild
> idea though, but hey.
You mean doing another mistake to back up the first one? Really, this
is not how we work.
I have sympathy for trying to unify everything, but it can be taken too
far. In particular, to unify things that are fundamentally different
is wrong.
Thanks,
Marcus
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