[OpenAFS-devel] DRAFT: New sysname standard

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 11:09 AM -0400 5/7/01, eichin-oa@boxedpenguin.com wrote:
>recall that Domain/OS (the last system that had interpolation of
>variables in pathnames) had several system-specified ones... but
>would also allow interpolation of arbitrary environment variables.
>(I shudder now to think about the security implications, but
>there were some cool uses.)

While it's easy to think of cool uses, I *really* do not want
to discuss support for arbitrary environment variables.  To my
mind, it brings up too many issues wrt security and performance,
and thus it scares me off.

I think we could do a few system-specified variables though.
My guess is that it would probably be best to try for as few
as possible, just enough so we aren't trying to have @sys
serve for incompatible uses.

("incompatible" in the sense that one such use might require
a new @sys value in a situation where a different use would
neither require nor desire a new value).

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu