Subject: Re: path component substitutions (was diskless booting)
To: Stefan Grefen <grefen@connie.de.convex.com>
From: Ty Sarna <tsarna@endicor.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/15/1994 17:14:30
Stefan Grefen wrote:
> OOops, I haven't looked at it, but I've assumed that the critical part of
> symlink handling is outside of some specific FS code. I'll look at it
> at the weekend.

Again, the generic vfs code provides the translation unctions, it's up
to individual filesyetem to call the functions in the right places.

> I hate to have to differnt ways to do the same thing, or to have special
> solution and a more general one. I'll always try to eliminate 
> the special one, just to keep thing simple.

both "cat file" and "cp file /dev/tty" print a file on your terminal.
So, which command should we remove from NetBSD? Neither, because while
both provide some overlapping functionality, neither is a subset of the
other. Both do things the other can't.

> > > I know, (masscomp springs to mind here ...) but it was sometimes a nightmare
> > > educating the users why they couldn't find there file right now ...
> > 
> > I'm not sure what you mean. Why couldn't they find a file?
> They had context depend symlinks, for bsd universe and a sysv universe.
> One wrong command and all conditional symlinks for that process changed....

Oh. That won't happen here unless someone changes the sysname or
hostname of the system while it's running. In either case, you're going
to get all sorts of other unexpected results anyway if that happens,
and it's not something that happens normally.

> Please make the symlink stuff optional, I just found out the fast symlink
> stuff isn't optional anymore .... I've to reverse that for my next project.

Hmmm... how do fast symlinks mess up what you're doing?

-- 
Ty Sarna                 "As you know, Joel, children have always looked
tsarna@endicor.com        up to cowboys as role models. And vice versa."

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