On Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 12:50:36AM -0500, John Tobey wrote: > Wouldn't this mess about /bin:/usr/bin and /lib:/usr/lib be solved by > a creative use of directory mapping (or whatever that Hurd feature is > called)? How does it work?
Well, we already heard that this is a nice feature not implemented yet, but I will take this chance and explain the real problem, which would not be solved by shadowfs. The real problem is, that we don't know what the problems are. However, it is likely that we will get overlaps, that means, some package will contain /file/which/is/called/foo, and some other (or even the same!) will contain /usr/file/which/is/called/foo. It should be easy to write a script which finds such overlaps. If you are interested, the Debian ftp site contains a file "Contents.gz" in the following format, which makes it very easy: bin/ash shells/ash bin/bash base/bash bin/cat base/textutils bin/chgrp base/fileutils However, this is only half of the full story. Some packages _create_ additional files or symlinks in their installation scripts. For example, /bin/vi is a script in the "ae" package, but every vi package (nvi, vim) creates a symlink /usr/bin/vi via update-alternatives (which, btw, fails because /bin/vi exists already). This leads to subtle problems, for example, calling "vi" results in a loop which does not terminate, because /bin/vi is calling /usr/bin/vi... This problem can't be solved by shadowfs, obviously. The only solution is to seperate /usr completely from /, or to find all such conflicts and solve them in one way or another. I have no idea how much of these problems exist. It can be just one, or some dozens. Debian has over 2000 packages, auditing them all seems to ne unpractical :) Thanks, Marcus -- "Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann http://www.debian.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
