Re: Anybody working on removing sendmail from base?

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:If a variant symlink uses an unset variuable then the lookup probably fails.
:
:I mean - you could probably do defaulting (say using ${VARNAME:default} 
:instead of ${VARNAME} or something), do we want this? For that matter,
:*what* should the variant symlinks precicely do? Can $VARNAME contain 
:say "../lib/somepath/../lib2" ? 
:
:> -Chris
:
:-- 
:	Sander

    A variant symlink would simply be a substitution.  I would even go as far
    as to say that it would be a single-level, non-recursive substitution.
    I don't see any particular reason to limit what the contents of the
    variables can be.

    I think the default idea is actually quite reasonable but I also see
    there being several 'layers' of variable sets:  system level, user level,
    and process level.  Maybe group-level would be good too but there are
    no current kernel structures for that.

    In the layered design the system level would contain system-wide
    defaults, making those variables optional in the user and process layers.

    The biggest question is how to store the variables.  Storing them in
    kernel memory is my prefered solution so the substitutions can be done
    simply, without adding any significant complexity to the kernel.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>