rbutterworth@watmath.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth) (08/18/89)
I've just installed a new version of showpath everywhere (I think), and this should be the final version (I hope). Internally, the major change is that the showpath/data files are no longer used. i.e. the standard search rules for each architecture are compiled into the program. This makes it faster and a lot easier to maintain and distribute (no more nests of symlinks). Other packages can define their own control files if needed however. For instance, Christy needs to access the accounts package's maintenance commands, but doesn't need any other package's maintenance commands, so she can put "accounts:guru" in her showpath command and get the directories listed in /software/accounts/data/showpath/command/guru. Other packages can define their own control files as needed, for "Type=package:name", with the "name" part being entirely at the discretion of that package's maintainer. The files can be local or everywhere. (i.e. the showpath maintainer (me:-) doesn't have to worry about any of that stuff.) (A suggestion I haven't yet implemented is that if the :name file is a directory rather than a control file, then that directory itself would go into the search path. Thus for instance, one could have a directory of symlinks to some of the maintainer commands and thereby make only that subset available to people that request it. I'm still not convinced that this is either a good or a bad idea yet.) For most users the syntax is `showpath standard $HOME/bin`. For most mfcf people it is `showpath Usedby=Maintainer standard $HOME/bin`. For most shell scripts it is `showpath U=Server standard`. For the moment the magic keywords "maintenance", "server", "console", and "operator" are still accepted (with a warning) and turned into u=m, u=s, console:server, and operations:guru. (If the maintainers of the console or operations packages want to use different names than server and guru they can change them.) I won't delete any of the old /software/mfcf-basics/data/showpath files just yet, and the old /software/mfcf-basics/bin/showpath commands are buried on watmath, orchid, daisy, maytag, and watsol in case there are any problems.