On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 12:13:13AM +0100, Per Olofsson wrote: > I'm not really sure I like the symlink farming thing, but I don't know > how it should be implemented otherwise either.
You could have a DISTS_PATH (=/local/apps:/basesys/apps:/debian/apps etc.) environment variable and have programs search */bin under those directories, but I'm afraid that could be too slow, hence the symlinks (or maybe even hard links for the cases where you need the attributes of many files?). Note that Debian has a lot of stuff symlinked to /etc/alternatives and back to the real version from there. Stow of course can be used to install software much in the way I described, but it really shouldn't be necessary to make the links for anything else except the binaries as those are accessed so frequently. Most importantly libraries and headers should _not_ be symlinked anywhere; only a directory versioned by the API version alone should be linked to the app directory of an actual release (ion-2 -> ion-2-20040207 etc.). -- Tuomo
