From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: From: Ethan Grammatikidis To: ebo@sandien.com, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v936) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:51:42 +0100 References: <17291D00-8580-474A-B398-8DCE626A9042@fastmail.fm> , Subject: Re: [9fans] 9vx patch to read environment var PLAN9 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 016bf62c-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 14 Apr 2010, at 19:38, EBo wrote: > >> hardcode your own path and let the next sucker repeat the story > > fair enough, and now for the heart of the question that I have been > dancing > around all along (actually I thought it was obvious) -- what is the > best way > to fix this section of code so that we can be done with it once and > for all? > Remove all hard coded paths and require -r and startup from root > dir? ok. > add the env variable? ok. do whatever I am going to do and never > post my > patches to start another flame drizzle (as compared to an all out > flame war)? > So, what's to be done? Watching yet another 'flame drizzle' (good term, btw) is precisely what made me grumpy, sorry about that. I get really tired of watching them but don't do any good when I get involved, so I don't know what to do really. Perhaps if I only comment if I can think of something positive. If I do have a constructive comment on this subject, I can't see any harm in adding both /usr/local/9vx and /opt/9vx to the hard-coded paths as these are paths on the host system, not plan 9, and thus *shouldn't* start up that old debate again. I think /usr/local and / opt are both commonly used for odd binary trees, P9p being a prime example with build instructions suggesting /usr/local/plan9 and more than one Linux distro choosing /opt/plan9. I'm not so sure about /usr/lib or /usr/share. I'd tolerate both (I've stopped caring about the unix filesystem hierarchy), but speaking as a long-time Linux user they don't feel right, especially not /usr/share. If you do put them in they probably won't draw any trouble as just hard-coded paths hidden in the source. Is there any harm in putting in as many hard-coded paths in as might be reasonable? -- Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. -- Alan Perlis