Re: Proposal: an addition to glib for getting the absolute path of the current binary.

[mortenw gnome org (Morten Welinder)]

>> - User ran out of disk space on their primary / or /usr partition, so
>> added a new hard disk mounted at /mnt/new-hard-disk. They want to be able
>> to install relocatable RPMs and other types of binary package to their new
>> hard disk.
>Different prefixes and use mount --bind ?

Yeah, right.

# mount --bind
mount: illegal option -- -
mount: illegal option -- b
mount: illegal option -- i
mount: option requires an argument -- d
Usage:
mount [-v | -p]
mount [-F FSType] [-V] [current_options] [-o specific_options]
        {special | mount_point}
mount [-F FSType] [-V] [current_options] [-o specific_options]
        special mount_point
mount -a [-F FSType ] [-V] [current_options] [-o specific_options]
        [mount_point ...]

(If you want to ask what system that is, you're missing the point.)


><snip>
>> - Network administrator wishes to install binaries to a directory on his
>> server and then have it mounted at /some-app-server on the client
>> machines. He doesn't want to have to recompile all the software (which
>> might not even be possible)
> Why not let the machine do the recompile work ?

Are you kidding?  This is a total nightmare unless you are certain that all
machines are identical.  Machine parks may start that way, but they will soon
diverge.  Specific reasons:  1. No compiler, perhaps.  2. Different compiler
causing things to blow up.  3. Different or missing header files causing
things to blow up.  4. Lack of resources (disk space, memory, cpu power,
whatever) to do the compile.



I get the impression that you don't want to see the problem.  People
want to move programs after compilation.  Always have, always will.
There are lots of reasons for this, and the solution really never is
to tell people they don't want to do that.

Reasons for moving programs:

1. Different mount points.
2. chroot environments.
3. Lack of permissions to install in intended place.  (Or maybe you
   just want to install that pre-compiled package over in /usr/local.)
4. Wish for several versions to be installed simultaneously.


Morten