translators within themselves (was: hurd does NOT need /hurd)
* [Marcus Brinkmann]
> On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 04:59:37PM +0200, Lars Weber wrote:
>> Is this also true for passive translators? Do they also not store the
>> path to the translator executable (as I've thought until now) but a direct
>> reference to the file instead? If so, what would happen if the translator
>> is replaced by a newer version for example?
>
> They store the complete filename, but I am not sure right now about their
> execution context. I would expect as they are started by the parent
> filesystem, they get to see whatever the parent filesystem sees at this
> filename.
(removed -devel from Cc)
As far as I can understand, this particular branch of the discussion is
about whether a translator within the underlying directory of a passive
translator works. Currently, it doesn't, at least not in the general
case.
Experiment:
$ cp /hurd/null somedir/
$ settrans somedir somedir/null
$ cat somedir
If translators within directories within translators worked, cat somedir
would return nothing, just the same as cat /dev/null. On my system, cat
would hang, waiting for input, until killed. I did not investigate this
further.
If you set up an active translator instead (settrans -a), it all works
just beautifully.
There might be some tricks I don't know of to make this work also for
passive translators, but currently, it does not seem to work "out of the
box". I can't think of any situation where this would be particularly
useful, anyway.
Oystein
--
When in doubt: Think again.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-hurd-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: