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Re: hurd does NOT need /hurd



Hi,

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 Jährling 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.

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

In other words, what you seem to advocate for is a sort of
/bin-but-just-not-in-PATH, just because it's not a 'command' in the
strictest sense. But look, Unix doesn't have commands; they are not
really treated separately from executable images. PATH is a weak
concept, considering the fact that a lot of things need to set it
explicitly, cron resets it, etc. etc.

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.

Cheers,


Emile.

--
E-Advies / Emile van Bergen   |   e-advies@evbergen.xs4all.nl
tel. +31 (0)70 3906153        |   http://www.e-advies.info


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