[13962] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 7.7T: sunsoft wrapper perl script ...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cfields@MIT.EDU)
Mon Oct 30 15:30:52 1995
From: cfields@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 95 15:30:34 -0500
To: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Cc: jawetzel@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
> That's a very poor assumption. Lots of people run many things in AFS
> either via the full afs paths, or via symlinks to the full afs path
> that are not /mit/lockername/somethingbin/file.
Not to start a flame war on the bugs mailing list, but the fact that
you *can* attempt to run software directly from its AFS path by no
means implies that you *should*. In fact, to do so is to break the
abstraction barrier created by attach. It is a very useful
abstraction, and if you want to break it and you lose, too bad.
> Wrapper scripts should be written to not make silly assumptions.
To assume that the locker you live in is attached is not a silly
assumption. The fact that AFS provides an alternate access path is
irrelevant. Do you suggest that all C code that needs to look for
random configuration files look in the full AFS path rather than
/mit/lockername/lib (or whatever)? This is wrong. It prevents lockers
from being moved around, either between filsystem types or between AFS
directories, without recompilation. It is generally a maintenance
headache, especially in the long term, and not worth any benefit
gained by people not having to run attach.
Craig
