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christoph remarked: | > On Mon, 2 Aug 1999 Chris DiTrani <cditrani at ne.mediaone.net> wrote: | > | > /usr/bin/mh is a symlink to ".", which makes /usr/bin/mh a reference to | > /usr/bin. The behavior you're seeing is a natural side effect of this. | > | > /usr/bin/mh is the original installation directory for the Rand MH, and | > some third-party tools depended on it; hence the symlink to maintain | > backwards compatibility. | In my opinion, this is a silly hack. If RedHat builds the packages from | source, they should be able to control things better than this. | A few years back, this type of recusive linking provided endless headaches | when used with tar, find & cpio, and even worse was the unix-unaware vender | that ported crummy code. Also, putting all the components of a package like mh into /usr/bin isn't all that wise an idea. This is an invitation to having package X stomp on package Y by "accidentally" installing an executable with the same name as one of Y's executables. For a package with only one executable, this isn't much of a problem, but for a package like mh with a whole flock of executables, it is a recipe for disaster and finger pointing and user bafflement. A much better approach would be to install such complex packages into their own directories, as is conventionally done with X11 (and was done with the original mh). Users who need to directly exec pieces of the package will need to be told what to add to their $PATH, of course, or a startup script could do it for them. But this isn't much of a constraint, and is much easier to deal with than trying to diagnose problems with one package overwriting another's executables. I'm reminded of the many months it took me to get ghostview to work properly. For the longest time, it just gave me bizarre error windows with incomprehensible error messages. I finally discovered that the problem was another package I'd installed that had an executable called "gs", which had wiped out ghostview's program by the same name. I re-installed both of them into different directories (from a non-su account so that they couldn't install their pieces into /bin or /usr/bin), and wrapped their main commands in scripts that put their own directories at the head of $PATH, and they both work now. -- Modern GUIs are very well designed, for people with three hands. The real problem has been how slow customers have been to make necessary hardware upgrades to meet the requirements of the software. - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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