Mail Archives: opendos/1997/03/13/13:40:08
On Thu, 13 Mar 1997, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote:
>
[snip]
> > Yes. Hardcoded directory names is one of the things I find
> > most pointless and counterproductive about Unix.
> >
> > Now, symlinks would be nice, but I'll settle for "mount".
> > I want to be able to mount all of my drives under one
> > hierarchy as well as A through Z.
>
> Symlinks and mountable installable filesystems are being talked
> about, and will probably be in the works once the sources are
> released. They are on the wishlist anyways.
>
> I actually prefer the hardcoded directories. That way I know
> that any given file is in the same spot on all 5 Linux machines
> that I use on a daily basis. My own, several college computers,
> etc. In contrast, by not having standard directories in DOS, one
> is left blind on a new machine. Have you ever tried to find
> PKUNZIP on someone's machine? Mine is in C:\UTILS which is in my
> path at ALL times. Other people either don't know where it is,
> or don't know what it is.
While I agree with the idea of a standard, I abhor hardcoded directory
names. I've already got my own directory structure and I hate programs
that won't respect that.
In lieu of hardcoded directories, I'd suggest a file whose contents look
something like this:
utility=c:\util
app=c:\dosapps;d:\dosapps
game=c:\games
library=d:\opendos\lib
temp=c:\temp
etc...
Different users would enter their own directories instead of mine.
Then an installer wanting to install off of an app directory would read
this file, and ask if it should install into c:\dosapps, d:\dosapps or
another directory. A simple "type paths.dir" would show you were
everything is.
This way, we keep our directories and enforce a standard.
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