ITP: netpbm

[Earnie Boyd]

"Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" wrote:
> 
> At 07:44 AM 4/29/2002, Earnie Boyd wrote:
-8<-
> The point is, the extra path walks are
> >expensive.
> 
> Quite true.  But I would say that Corinna's suggestion, from a strict
> technical perspective, makes netpbm in a different bin directory usable
> 'out-of-the-box' under Cygwin.  If netpbm were going to be put in it's
> own bin directory, I would say that adding files like the ones Corinna
> suggests is an absolute requirement.
> 

Yes, but you missed the point.

Go ahead, add something to the end of your PATH and execute it with
strace.  Then see how many times the pathing routines are called to
search for a symlink.  It's once for each directory listed in PATH and I
mean each directory listed in the path name of the path list (E.G.: a
PATH of /usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin has six directories in it).  And if
someone has a symlink in PATH, it's called again to see if the file
pointed to by the symlink is a symlink.  Note, the coding is necessary
for symlink simulation, but it's slows down time it takes to find the
binary file to exec.  Keep the binaries to the front of the PATH and put
them in /bin.

Earnie.