From: jjsf@gmv.es (Julio Sanchez) Subject: Re: std TeX now in SLS package Date: 29 Oct 1992 16:09:49 GMT
In article <1992Oct27.032310.1842@athena.mit.edu> alsaggaf@athena.mit.edu (M. Saggaf) writes:
>In article <8748@vtserf.cc.vt.edu> tdunbar@vttcf.cc.vt.edu (Thomas Dunbar) writes:
>[...]
>Using directories like /usr/TeX to store binaries and man pages (under
>bin/ and man/) imposes an unnecessary hustle on the user. He has to
>add each bin directory to his path and has to modify his
>manpath.config file to look for the new man directory. Even by using
>symbolic links you can avoid that hustle unless you link every files
>in /usr/TeX/{bin,man} individually to /usr/{bin,man}. What is wrong
>with following the established convention and putting the binaries and
>manual pages in /usr/bin (or /usr/local/bin) and /usr/man? Please
>don't make us have paths like /usr/Tex/bin:/usr/emacs/bin:/usr/groff/bin:
>..etc. After all, wasn't that the way it was in DOS?
>
I agree that adding directories for the sake of it is not good.
However, I have found cases where this is *very* convenient.
Sometimes you have executables (or man pages or whatever) with the
same name that you must tell apart. I am not talking about
coincidence of names. Sometimes they are supposed to be the same
only not quite. E.g. Sun used to send with Sun Fortran a modified
dbx able to debug C *and* Fortran. Using this debugger or not made
a difference. Sometimes your configuration is baselined to include
such and such version of whatever. In that case you want a lot of
flexibility. You could configure each machine to provide the
exact configuration needed. But it is an administration nightmare
and does not solve the problem of projects that have to share
hosts because of varying workloads or low needs and makes difficult
to take any available host and get you favourite tools.
What we do here is to let the user configure her environment for
her needs. I wrote a few scripts that let the user see what
packages are available, see a description of them and select a
configuration (i.e. PATH, MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, environment
settings such as OPENWINHOME, etc.) The scripts then, automagically,
change her .cshrc.
I was the administrator then and it made my life much easier.
Still some hosts had to be configured in an ad-hoc fashion
but they were only a few. And users could configure their
environments themselves. I am serious, many people are regular
UNIX users, they may even be competent programmers in their
area of interest but don't understand (need not understand)
the idiosyncracies of the OS.
And this might not make any sense to you, but in certain
environments is very desirable. So I don't think I want a moby
path on my home machine, but I see why others might want it.
Julio
-- Julio Sanchez, GMV SA, Isaac Newton 11, PTM Tres Cantos, E-28760 Madrid, Spain Ph. +34 1 807 21 85 | jsanchez@gmv.es | Traveller, there is no Fax +34 1 807 21 99 | jsanchez%gmv.es@Spain.EU.net | path; paths are made by Telex 48487 GMEV E | Julio_Sanchez_GMV@EuroKom.ie | walking (A. Machado)