[20] in Locker Maintainers
Re: shared "binary" directory
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (chad brown)
Fri Jan 23 00:58:10 1998
To: Jeremy C Daniel <jdaniel@MIT.EDU>
Cc: locker-maintainers@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 22 Jan 1998 23:22:54 EST."
<199801230422.XAA18198@x15-cruise-basselope.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 00:58:05 EST
From: chad brown <yandros@MIT.EDU>
The main debate that I see over such things is where they `should' go
in a well-organized locker, to make things intuitive for people poking
around the locker. (as a counter example, the sipb locker once had
the convention of putting platform-inspecific scripts in the `rtbin'
directory, and making symlinks from the other directories)
While the ability could be nice, I'm not convinced that the added
functionality of such a things would outweigh the two big
disadvantages that I see:
1) adding things to the path makes some operations (startup and path
modification, in a smart shell) slower.
2) most such scripts aren't really completely platform-independant,
especially portable to a completely new platform. If you're not
worried about being able to support new platforms, then there's
little reason to put it in the path. If you do worry about that,
then, IMHO, it is reasonable to require locker maintainers to go to
extra effort to support a new platform.
