[csw-maintainers] Shared library placement proposal

[Maciej Bliziński]

2011/2/9 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
> 2011/2/8 Maciej Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org>:
>> 2011/2/8 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
>>
>>> As far as I can think of, there is no clean simple grammatical
>>> construct you can use, that covers  "move the file, or make a
>>> symlink".
>>> Using the word "move" in the spec, denies the use of sylinks. The
>>> whole point of symlinking, is to NOT move, but make a reference
>>> instead.
>>
>> Please take another look at the revision 2011-02-08 of the document, I
>> don't think it mandates the use of regular files only.
>>
>> http://wiki.opencsw.org/proposal:shared-library-placement
>
> As requested, I took another look.
>
> I hate to say it, but perhaps must do so. Please take this in the most
> neutral manner;
> perhaps you are missing a nuance of English in this. Using the word
> "move", disallows symlinks.
> You have to use a different word.
>
> The last paragraphs almost make flexible use of the word "move", but
> only becuase they dont fully mandate putting anything in /opt/csw/lib
> at all.
>
> In contrast, where you do mandate something, you unambiguously used
> the word "move" again.
>
> " If a library previously thought to be private is in fact needed by
> other software, it has to be first moved to the shared library
> location,"
>
> SO:
>
> "has to" == "must"
>
> "moved to the shared library location" == "mv blah.so /opt/csw/lib".

Yes, and "blah.so" could be either a regular file, or a symlink.  What
it is, does not matter in this paragraph.  What the paragraph says, is
that it has to be moved.

The text doesn't use the "a library or a symlink to it" expression
each time, because if we started to do this in every case where
symlinks could be used, the policy would be rather unreadable.

We could add a paragraph clarifying that were the word "library" or
"file"[1] is used, it is a shorthand for making that file available
either as a regular file, or as a symlink to it.

> That wording disallows symlinks.

Phil, could you address the paragraph from the link below?  It
concerns the very issue of symlinks.

http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/maintainers/2011-February/014016.html

Maciej

[1] I'm using quotes, because I'm refering to the literal strings, not
because I think that they are not really libraries or files.