On Sun, 13 Jun 1999, Chuck Youse wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is meant by a "variant link", and
> what might one be used for?
In my fantasy world, a variant symlink is kind of a way of putting a
search path into a symbolic link, so that if you had an environment
variable E=a:b:c, and you had a symbolic link created with
ln -s /some/where/\${E}/foo bar
when you execute a command like
more bar/baz.txt
it would look for /some/where/a/foo/bax.txt, then
/some/where/b/foo/baz.txt, then /some/where/c/foo/baz.txt.
It's akin to what the unionfs tries to do, but it doesn't care about
creating total transparency, and it doesn't mask directories, and changes
to one process's search order don't affect other process's search orders,
so you don't have to do all those machinations with loopback mounts and
things like that. It's much more along the lines of VMS's logicals, if
yoy know of those.
As for uses, in my fantasy world, I personally would be using it for
system testing where I have a rather large base system which gets modified
per customer. "export CUSTOMER=foo; gosystem" would be so nice...
Marc.
>
> Chuck Youse
> Director of Systems
> cyo...@cybersites.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marc Ramirez <mr...@gbtb.com>
> To: hack...@freebsd.org <hack...@freebsd.org>
> Date: Sunday, June 13, 1999 1:12 PM
> Subject: symlink question
>
>
> >
> >Sorry if I'm bothering you busy folk unnecessarily...
> >
> >If I wanted to add variant symlinks, would that just require modifications
> >to namei, or is that way too simplistic?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >Marc.
> >
> >--
> >Marc Ramirez - Owner Great Big Throbbing Brains
> >mr...@gbtb.com http://www.gbtb.com
> >Our brains throb, so yours won't have to!
> >
> >
> >
> >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org
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> >
>
>
>
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--
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