On 10/18/05, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Carl Lowenstein wrote:
> >>At one company, we had *hordes* of scripts that did what you said and
> >>hard encoded the paths. We had entire directories which had been around
> >>for 5 years simply to support the links to enable those scripts.
> >>Eventually, I got fed up with debugging this network of links on a
> >>semi-weekly basis for my engineering team.
> >
> >
> > Not sure whether those brittle symbolic links were made of straw, to
> > support the straw-man argument.
>
> Main Entry: straw man
> Function: noun
> 1 : a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up
> only to be easily confuted
> 2 : a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable
> transaction
>
> If that your implication is that my experience is fictitious, I take
> exception to your implication.
>
> Some of us live in the real world and inherit situations which are less
> than ideal.
>
> We also have to deal with a little known task known as "maintenance".
>
> Unfortunately, most open source types somehow miss that. This leads to
> the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers development model.
No. I don't mean to imply that the experience is fictitious. I do
observe that the situation as described arose from patching up
obsolete program paths internal to scripts by using symbolic links
rather than fixing the scripts themselves.
If the cleaned up scripts locate their constitutent programs by
searching a common $PATH doesn't this require either that all users
have the same PATH or that scripts declare PATH internally? The first
is a different can of worms, the second was my alternate suggestion to
the use of absolute paths.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
