sourcenav deb dir layout

Mike A. Harris mharris@opensourceadvocate.org
Wed Oct 18 00:30:00 GMT 2000


On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Ben Elliston wrote:

>   What is the reasoning behind bringing a copy of grep and other utils
>   with sourcenav? Is it for systems not having it?  If so, can I safely
>   exclude it from the Red Hat packages?
>
>The version of grep that is built by S-N includes a number of command line
>options that were necessary to make it work better with S-N -- for instance,
>it emitted progress indication to stderr which S-N used to give visual
>feedback of grep's progress.
>
>I believe the current version eliminates the need for a special version of
>grep, but I could be mistaken.  I'll leave that up to one of the current
>team to speak about.

When a specific program or util MUST use it's own local copy of a
standard system tool, it should rename it to avoid problems.  In
other words, Source Nav's "grep" should be renamed: sn-grep or
something similar.

It broke many system scripts I have, and caused several days of
"WTH is going on?" questions..  ;o)

You never know how a user's path is going to look.  Programs like
xcdroast used to include cdrecord, mkisofs, etc.. and called them
"mycdrecord", "mymkisofs" to avoid conflict.  It also put them in
its own private dir not in the path.

Just some suggestions...

Take care all.
TTYL


----------------------------------------------------------------------
      Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Open source advocate
              Computer Consultant - Capslock Consulting
                 Copyright 2000 all rights reserved
----------------------------------------------------------------------


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