Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!udel!new
From: new@udel.EDU (Darren New)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Idea for program start-up (long)
Message-ID: <17728@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 15 Jun 89 15:18:24 GMT
References: <0873.AA0873@chroma>
Sender: usenet@udel.EDU
Reply-To: new@udel.EDU (Darren New)
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 22

My thoughts along those lines were these:
When I first heard that ENV: was assigned to a disk, I thought it
was a great idea. "Now we only have to set the environment once instead
of every time we boot."
Sadly, ENV: is initially assigned to RAM: and it looks like C= is
encouraging people to put non-environmental things out there
such as "list >env:qw{$$} blah blah".
My thought is to make two environmental spaces, one for temporary
stuff and one for actually storing the environment.
In other words, get rid of ">env:{$$}" stuff in scripts and just use
RAM: instead. This way, people could leave ENV: assigned to disk and
just SetEnv once and for all. Also, during installation, software could
write its configuration out to ENV: and not have to worry about putting
a SetEnv into the Startup-Sequence.
It would also be possible to simply COPY SYS:ENV RAM:ENV ALL in order
to initally install the environment, but then a script file or something
would need to be added to copy it back down (or better, two different
SetEnvs. Even better: "SetEnv EDITOR memacs PERMANENT"). These changes
would seem minimal; possibly as little as changing a few script files.
One of the things about Unix that bugs me is the mixing of the
environment and the shell variables -- please don't continue this way.
		     -- Darren