[haiku-development] Re: RFC: /usr symlink?
- From: pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:28:31 -0700
On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 10:05:18PM -0400, Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Alexander von Gluck IV
> <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > mmadia pointed out this was discussed previously:
> > //www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/usrbin
>
> OK, this has inspired a rant:
>
> I'm sorry guys, all the arguments in that thread are unconvincing, and
> amount to nothing more than "Haiku does this a certain way, and that
> is it, no ifs, ands or buts and no compromising."
THANK YOU, Ryan!
I was reading that thread and getting thoroughly depressed, because
I couldn't find any actual *reason* for dismissing such a link.
It's a trivial addition that is unlikely to confuse anybody.
I've had it in my own UserBootScript since probably BeOS 4 days,
so that I don't always have to change scripts -- such as Ruby -- that
I import, and can write OS-independent scripts of my own that I can
publish without having to remember to edit the shebang.
Sure it's a historical oddity, but as Ryan points out every other
OS (except Windows of course, but we definitely don't want to be
like them!) has accepted its necessity.
Hacking the runtime_loader to translate that specific path is an
alternative, I suppose, but I really can't see why that's preferable
to the simple link. I see suggestions that refugees from Linux
would be confused, expecting "/usr/share", etc., but all they have
to do is look in the directory, and find that they're not there!
There's a major difference between porting some project that will
need to conform to OS conventions, and being able to simply run
cross-platform scripts without having to hack them first.
-- Pete --
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