[ILUG] file management

[kevin lyda]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 06:43:48PM +0000, Paul Jakma wrote:
> grumble... been a pet peeve of mine for a long while..

oh god, you don't have to be wrong *all* the time.  sheesh.

back in 1993 i'd have agreed.  we had all sorts of slick scripts to link
files to /usr/bin (or rather /usr/local/bin) and all that sort of fun.
kind of easy to maintain - in one place we even dealt with versions.
but in all cases we had to script it up manually.

now they have rpm, deb and other fun things.  and it all just works.
and my PATH var is nice and compact.  that's a feature.  "but there are
1500 files in /usr/bin!"  well golly gee, when i used mh i had over
3000 files in ~/Mail/outbox.  and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or the much nicer
/etc/ld.so.conf) is also much nicer and compact.

i actually run apps from the commandline (gnome-help-browser, galeon,
soffice, xterm, gnome-terminal, xmms spring to mind right off the bat).
i'd rather PATH would stay it's nice, readable single line.

face it, redhat and debian have pushed through a major advance over
older unicies.  decent package management.  and that means that the
piss-poor method of "package management" used by older unicies - aka
the sacred directory concept - can be happily consigned to the scrap heap.

this is just my opinion of course...

kevin

-- 
kevin at suberic.net          "if you come from brooklyn you can handle just
fork()'ed on 37058400       about anything."  --nyc mayor, rudolph giuliani
meatspace place: home      
http://suberic.net/~kevin