Good ideas, but too far from the mainstream [LWN.net]

Good ideas, but too far from the mainstream

Posted Jan 13, 2008 1:16 UTC (Sun) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458)
In reply to: Good ideas, but too far from the mainstream by tzafrir
Parent article: GoboLinux

My old university had something a bit like this. It allowed them to have truly massive amounts
of software installed, and dozens of versions of some packages. Each user could then freely
pick and choose which versions of which packages (or modules, as they called them) to use, or
they could simply use the latest recommended version. It was extremly useful in an environemnt
with tens of thousands of users running software on something like half a dozen different
hardware platforms and half a dozen different operating systems.

I don't really know how useful this would be on a simple desktop system.

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Good ideas, but too far from the mainstream

Posted Jan 13, 2008 18:36 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I wrote a system at an old workplace which worked something like this. At 
login it traversed a dependency tree, built a pair of directories full of 
symlinks to binaries and shared libraries under /tmp, and pointed PATH and 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH through it. (It used shell traps to remove the 
directories, although if I'd had root privs I would probably have used PAM 
instead.)

(You could ask for specific binaries or all binaries from specific 
packages, but almost nobody but me ever did that. Most people just turned 
everything off and on when necessary, *sigh*)