Thoughts on Multi-Symlink Concept

[Willem Jan Withagen]

On 23-2-2014 17:30, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Feb 2014 10:18:31 -0500 (EST)
> Daniel Eischen <deischen at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 23 Feb 2014, Willem Jan Withagen wrote:
>>
>>> On 16-2-2014 6:16, Perry Hutchison wrote:
>>>> Jordan Hubbard <jordan.hubbard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Even variant symlinks (/bin -> /${ARCH}/bin), which can expand
>>>>> differently depending on the user context, have clearly
>>>>> understandable semantics - you know that the symlink is going
>>>>> to expand to exactly one file no matter what ARCH is set to.
>>>>
>>>> s/file/pathname/
>>>>
>>>> Depending on what ARCH is set to, the expanision may or may not
>>>> point to any actual file (or directory, or ...)
>>>
>>> Yes, please can we get these ....
>>>
>>> Apollo Domain systems had those, and they were great.
>>> Set SYSTYPE to BSD4 and get the BSD tree and all that came with it, or
>>> SYSV to get the other stuff.
>>>
>>> Would indeed work great for things like /bin or even
>>> /usr/local/etc -> /${HOST}/usr/local/etc
>>
>> This topic comes up every couple of years.  I recall
>> Domain OS fondly - it was my first UNIX-like OS.  I would
>> really like variant symlinks, but I predict in another
>> couple of years we'll be having the same conversation :-)
>>
> 
> Hear, hear!
> 
> When I saw the first post I immediately thought "is it 1994 again?"
> 
> Well, maybe the first discussion wasn't in 1994, but it was quite
> some time ago.

Should be around there when I took it up for the first time.
Last dates on the code are from 1998, but I'm shure it did not work at
that moment.

It comes around in a regular cycle about every 7 years. :)

--WjW