Re: hurd does NOT need /hurd
On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 11:24:07PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > They're referred to by the user, but they're not invoked by the user.
> In one sense, no program on Linux is invoked by the user--only the
> shell actually invokes the program, at the user's direction.
That's not a very helpful sense for this discussion.
If you want to indirectly invoke a command via the shell, you type:
$ /bin/sh -c 'ls'
If you want to invoke it directly, you type:
$ ls
Likewise for the Hurd servers:
$ settrans -a /mnt /hurd/msdos /dev/hda3
is an indirect invocation of /hurd/msdos (via settrans), and
$ /hurd/msdos
would be a direct invocation (although you'd probably need some arguments
or some environment setup in real life).
> But part of understanding and using the Hurd effectively is thinking
> of translators as being a new kind of "directly invoked" rather than
> merely referred to.
Sure. But this new kind of "direct" invocation is fundamentally
*in*direct: you don't run it yourself, you get settrans (or mount, or
whatever) to do it for you. While it's certainly more direct than having
the kernel do it, I don't think it counts as being direct enough to not
go in /usr/lib.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``BAM! Science triumphs again!''
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