Christof Warlich
2018-10-28 11:13:04 UTC
Hi,
I marked this as off-topic as this is not a request for help but the
suggestion of an idea to slightly extend the utility of the PATH
environment variable that I'd like to briefly discuss here.
Currently, there are two options when installing new binaries that
should "just be found" through the PATH environment variable:
1) Adding the binaries to a directory that typically is already part of
the PATH environment variable.
2) Putting the binaries into a new, dedicated directory and adding that
directory to the PATH environment variable.
Both approaches have considerable disadvantages: The first one leads to
cluttered directories (consider /user/bin on typical Linux
distributions), e.g. missing the capability to group the binaries into
the packages they belong, while the second causes a long and cluttered
PATH. And both approaches more or less fail for binaries with
conflicting (i.e. same) names.
I marked this as off-topic as this is not a request for help but the
suggestion of an idea to slightly extend the utility of the PATH
environment variable that I'd like to briefly discuss here.
Currently, there are two options when installing new binaries that
should "just be found" through the PATH environment variable:
1) Adding the binaries to a directory that typically is already part of
the PATH environment variable.
2) Putting the binaries into a new, dedicated directory and adding that
directory to the PATH environment variable.
Both approaches have considerable disadvantages: The first one leads to
cluttered directories (consider /user/bin on typical Linux
distributions), e.g. missing the capability to group the binaries into
the packages they belong, while the second causes a long and cluttered
PATH. And both approaches more or less fail for binaries with
conflicting (i.e. same) names.