Re: Windows and DLLs

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

Nils Philippsen wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, David Jeske wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 01, 1998 at 09:11:17PM +0200, Jochem Huhmann wrote:
> > > On Wed, 30 Sep 1998 17:24:08 PDT David Jeske wrote:

> Given the typical user is as communicative as I experienced in my time
> being an admin (I'm still one, it's still fun :-) In a system with say
> more than 100 users there will be at least 20 version of a certain app
> floating around in the users' homes before anyone even thinks about
> asking the admin to install it. This is a messy situation that I don't
> want to have (think of disk space, helping the users with various
> different version of which you don't even know that they exist). Oh, and
> I'd like to have a little control of what's installed on "my" systems. At
> least Joe Random User (!= Hacker) won't be playing around with 3733t hax0r
> t00ls when it doesn't come in a shrink wrapped install wizard like
> package (yeah, this would be the worst scenario (the d00des won't shrink
> wrap this, hopefully), but think of a netscape communicator ("but it's
> the latest beta version - I need this!") in every home directory -- disk
> space is valuable).

But your implication is that this is impossible currently, which it's
not. Users can *already* install their own copies of netscape. This is a
policy decision between a sysadmin and his or her users, not something
the OS should enforce uniformly. The OS should make it easy to do
whatever you want to do.

Furthermore, it should be relatively easy to have some periodic cron job
look for lots of duplicate apps and notify the sysadmin so that he or
she can install it globaly and email the users who have it telling them
they should delete their personal copies. Hell, it should be easy for
the system to tell if the same app is installed in a system directory
and in your own directory and offer to delete your copy for you.

If disk space is such a concern, why not just put a quota on people's
accounts?

> > Compare this with the current UNIX system of installing apps, where
> > users _cant_ install apps, because many apps are hard-coded to find
> > their datafiles in "/usr/local/<appname>".
> 
> As I am very confident with users not able to install the apps alone (or
> at least not that easily) it would be a good mechanism if apps worked out
> of the box in different directories (/opt, /usr, /usr/local, ...).

That's all that's being proposed (assuming that you mean that it could
work in arbitrary directories, not just the ones you listed). A side
effect of this is that it would work in people's home directories.

> > > How to make sure that all users are using the same version of an
> > > app?
> >
> > You don't.... user's voluntarily choose to use the same versions of the app.
> >
> > In the unix world, how do you install multiple versions of the same
> > apps without them colliding?
> 
> Who would need that? In the rare cases where this applies a little shell
> script is very handy (e.g. in the times where communicator 4 was still in
> beta, I had "netscape" as the original netscape 3 binary and a shell
> script "communicator" for the latest communicator beta - does this answer
> your question?).

It doesn't always work. What about associated data files?

Furthermore, not everyone will be willing or able to write a shell
script.

> > What libs and datafiles are you trying to update? If I'm a user, and I
> > install my own privte version of my email program, (which I can do on
> > UNIX if I pull down the source), you sure as heck shouldn't be mucking
> > with it.
> 
> You should be one of my users -- we sure would have big fun together, at
> least with this attitude of letting the admin do the dirty stuff, but heck
> I may do what I want on this system (even if it's not mine).

Well, there's a certain line you have to walk on either side. If I'm
renting an apartment, I recognize that the room doesn't belong to me,
and that there are certain restrictions on my use of it. But I don't
want my landlord going through my closet and desk and throwing out
anything he or she doesn't like.

Tim