HI, On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 05:36:40PM +0000, Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> It should be allowed for the system's default servers to be easily > overridden. (By setting environment variables, for example.) > > > This is partly implemented for the `crash' server (albeit largely > untested) and has been begun for the `exec' server (see task #6611) > and is missing for the others. > > > Especially, being able to easily override the `pfinet' server running > on `/servers/socket/2' would offer a large scale of possibilities. Plan9 has a rather simple solution for this: They have local namespaces (i.e. each process can have a different view of the filesystem), which allows easily installing alternative servers in place of the default ones for individual programs/users/whatever. The Hurd however, although technically possible, doesn't implement local namespaces in the standard filesystem servers; and having some reservations about local namespaces, I don't necessarily consider this an omission that should be fixed... It is possible though to give processes a different filesystem view, by using a proxy FS server. (In many situations, unionfs probably can serve as such a proxy, though it doesn't cover all cases I think; and not being optmized for this specific use case, it's probably not very efficient...) Of course, using such a proxy FS to replace only a single standard server is often overkill, so a solution with environment variables is probably desirable neverthelesse. I do not like environment variables very much, however. IMHO, per-process environment should rather be accessible through a special location in the filesystem. (Maybe this can be implemented on top of the existing environment handling in the Hurd?) In fact, systems offering a /proc filesystem, already allow access to the environement through the FS -- but in a rather obscure fashion. A user-friendly approach for that seems desirable. -antrik- _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list Bug-hurd@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
