Re: Relocatability of packages

[John Kodis <kodis jagunet com>]

On Fri, Sep 25, 1998 at 04:11:56PM -0400, Tim Moore wrote:
> The Doctor What wrote:
> > This would be the best solution, but I'd rather see if it's
> > possible to modify the linux program loader to understand that if
> > the program trying to be run ends in <file>.app and is a
> > directory, then it should run the file <file>.i386 or whatever the
> > architecture is under that <file>.app directory.
> 
> Well I just want to comment on this. This isn't really an option at all.
> 
> 1) It won't work cross platform.
> 
> 2) It would never get into the main kernel source, and requiring users
> to patch their kernels is probably the *least* usable thing we could do.

I think that it's already in the Linux kernel -- at least the hooks to
do it are.  This could be handled using the same
/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc mechanism that allows Java .class files to be
fed into the java bytecode interpreter when exec'd.  No kernel hacking
is required, only relatively simple usermode stuff.

However, point one still stands.

-- John Kodis.