Nicolas Williams wrote:
> Is run-time version selection required?

Environment variables have an inherent kharmic
burden which must be overcome.  They are intrinsically
evil.  They are the "global variables" of the execution
environment.

In addition to that, I don't see any justification to add the
runtime selection.  This is from Stephen's blog:

> One of the common questions that maintainers
> of the various language platform packages is "how can
> I make sure that /usr/bin/[language] points
> to the latest version of the package?".

>From that origination, I don't see how we get to
the requirement for runtime configuration.

The only argument I know in favor of environment variables
goes like this:  You never know what you might need to
tweak later, so you might as well put a backdoor in
your implementation in case someone needs it later.  That argument
used to be compelling to me, but after many years of
debugging through other people's complexity, I don't think
it's such a good idea anymore.

--chris

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