Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 07:59:49 -0800 (PST) From: Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> To: kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au (Kris Kennaway) Cc: nate@mt.sri.com, dnelson@emsphone.com, rivers@dignus.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: linux software installation and uname Message-ID: <199811101559.HAA14049@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.05.9811101703120.10232-100000@spectrum.physics.adelaide.edu.au> from Kris Kennaway at "Nov 10, 1998 5:10: 9 pm"
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According to Kris Kennaway: > On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Steve Kargl wrote: > [large amounts of context snip] >> I happen to disagree with the viewpoint that writing custom scripts >> for each commerical vendor is a better solution. There may be only >> a handful of scripts to write this month, but next month we will have >> more custom scripts. If linux continues to gain in popularity among >> commerical vendors, then we'll have to maintain a large collection of >> scripts. There is a point of "diminishing returns" with respect to >> maintain a large collection of scripts, particularly when a 4 line >> change to uname(1) will accommodate the majority of the vendor supplied >> scripts. My disagreement is with Nate, whom I respect for his antibloat stance, because he seems to want to ignore the problem. > I'm not sure we do disagree. Your 4-line change to uname(1) was to have it > respect an environment variable and return it as the result of uname(1), > correct? Yes. > Someone pointed out at some point in this somewhat confused discussion that > that would require people to repeatedly change their environment variables > before running different emulated binaries, each of which looks for uname(1) > at runtime. *Binaries* will probably call uname(3) which is a function in libc. If you are running a linux binary, uname(3) will be picked up from /compat/linux/usr/lib/libc.so.5. I have not checked its return value, but my suggested change can have no affect on uname(3). My suggested change can have only an affect on shell scripts that call uname(1). In my case, the script was needed to install and partially configure the Portland Group Fortran compilers. -- Steve finger kargl@troutmask.apl.washington.edu http://troutmask.apl.washington.edu/~clesceri/kargl.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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