Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!ksr!ubglue!dudek
From: dudek@ubglue.ksr.com (Glen Dudek)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Using perl without "#!"
Message-ID: <235@ksr.UUCP>
Date: 23 Feb 88 19:40:27 GMT
References: <184@ateng.UUCP> <1291@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1150@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> <717@stride.Stride.COM> <473@pcrat.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@ksr.UUCP
Reply-To: dudek@ksr.UUCP (Glen Dudek)
Organization: Kendall Square Research, Cambridge MA
Lines: 31

In article <473@pcrat.UUCP> rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes:
>
>I hate having a zillion environment variables laying around.
>
>I hate man(1) not knowing where the man page got stashed.
>
>I hate auxilliary files laying around in .../lib.
>
>I hate telling people how to setup and/or find the above mentioned
>stuff.
>

The best software distribution scheme I have seen uses command line
arguments to pass information about where the auxiliary files for
a program reside.  This is taken from the startup of the Saber-C
program development environment (a wonderful debugging and program
development system :-)

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/lib/Saber/saber_exec -h/usr/local/lib/Saber \
    -gsaber@harvard.harvard.edu $*

This requires no changes to object file format, no environment variables
that need to be put in everyones login initialization, no recompiling
after changing a configuration file, and is completely self-documenting.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help the man page problem.
--
Glen Dudek
Kendall Square Research
Disclaimer: These are my opinions, and may not be anyone elses.