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Re: Multipurpose binaries with different names


From: Jan Engelhardt
Subject: Re: Multipurpose binaries with different names
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:57:33 +0200 (CEST)
User-agent: Alpine 2.00 (LSU 1167 2008-08-23)

On Friday 2009-07-24 13:56, Eric Blake wrote:
>> when one has a program that does something like
>> 
>>   if(strcmp(argv[0], "gunzip") == 0)
>>     uncompress();
>>   else
>>     compress();
>
>GNU Coding Standards frown on this practice:
>http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/standards.html#User-Interfaces
>
>Instead, it should be done the way coreutils differentiates 'ls' from
>'dir' behavior - the latter merely #defines a single variable to choose a
>different set of defaults, then includes the source of the former.[...]
>That said, you are correct that not all programs follow GCS this closely.

The reason to do symlinking is that some programs are large enough to
warrant not compiling them again or have a double copy of it on the
filesystem. The presence of /usr/bin/dir in system I would consider a
waste of space, even if it's "just" 100K. Do that with something
larger - inkscape/inkview seems to be such a candidate - and you
quickly waste more space.
I might resort to using shell scripts instead of symlinks that
will use (using original example) `gzip --mode=gunzip`, because
install(1) does not preserve symlinks across copies either. Gah.




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