Re: Perl wrapper bad

[J. Mallett]

* From Joshua Goodall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ... when I say "bad" I don't mean in execution. I mean that
> the idea of a redirecting wrapper for one special program seems to
> me an architectural wart that shouldn't be pushed on the userbase.

With no gain except supporting improperly-shebanged scripts.

We can use s/// in ports to fix shebangs, so there's not much excuse
there, and I'd rather have a tool using autoconf find the Real perl
than the wrapper, but to do this I have to deviate from the path I
normally use to prefer system utilities over local ones:
/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/local/bin:/a/pkg/bin: \
/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/etc:/usr/gnu/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/a/pkg/sbin

Can you spot all the places Perl might be there?  Can you now tell me
which one a ``wrapper'' for "the 'real' Perl" should look?  And what about
where autoconf scripts should find perl?
-- 
J. Mallett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>FreeBSD: The Power To Serve


"I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically."
   -- George W. Bush, Radio-Television Correspondents Association
  dinner, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001

To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message

Perl wrapper bad

[Joshua Goodall]

... when I say "bad" I don't mean in execution. I mean that
the idea of a redirecting wrapper for one special program seems to
me an architectural wart that shouldn't be pushed on the userbase.

Not only does it conflict in style with the existing mailwrapper,
but it introduces a DWIM feature without precedent.  Using PATH is
simply wrong in restricted-path cases.

The idea that manually creating a symlink is an insufficient solution
is an underestimation of the intelligence of the FreeBSD userbase.

Those who think that a generalisation of mailwrapper would be a
cleaner solution can try the following *proof-of-concept*:

echo 'myperl /usr/local/bin/perl' >> /etc/mail/mailer.conf
ln -s /usr/sbin/mailwrapper /usr/bin/myperl
/usr/bin/myperl -v

This also works for suidperl.

Joshua

To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message