🚀 go-pugleaf

From the keyboard of sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford):
:Larry Wall writes
:> Make the world a saner place and push for /usr/bin/perl.
:
:Boo! Hiss!
:
:And when you upgrade /usr/bin gets clobbered by the new  
:operating system.  I reserve /usr/bin for what comes from  
:the vendor.  Helps me keep track of who to Froth at when  
:things break... <wry grin>

Any vendor who actually clears your partition on an 
upgrade should be considered Evil.  You really shouldn't
let them get away with this.  If you wanted a new disk,
you'd ask for it.

Sane upgrade technology is an area that many vendors
desperately need to work on.  I'm sure we could all
recount stories on the oxymoronic nature (emphasis
on the moronic) nature of painless upgrades.

:However /usr/local/bin is great for this purpose.  For me  
:this is almost always a link pointing to a directory on an  
:NFS mounted disk.  Keeping all the stuff I've accumulated  
:on one disk helps.  (This same disk has the /LocalApps  
:/LocalLibrary /Demos etc)  This means I can back up all the  
:local stuff I've got working by backing up a single disk.

In the particular case of perl, it really does make things *much*
easier if there is an agreed-upon, standard location.  The 
preferred strategy is to put a link in /usr/bin pointing to 
where it actually lives, which varies from machine to machine.

Of course, those lucky folks whose vendors already ship perl 
on the system in /usr/bin have no such concern. (Hm, I've been
thinking of putting it in /bin so it's mounted with root. :-)

--tom

-- 
    Tom Christiansen      tchrist@convex.com      convex!tchrist

In English, every word can be verbed.  Would that it were so in our
programming languages.