Unix deficiencies/problems

[Kemp at DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL]

There has been the continuing debate here about the lack of VMS style
logical names under Unix, with most of the Unix people saying:  "Use
environment variables and/or symbolic links".  Well, that doesn't hack
it even for those of us that DON'T have billions of lines of COBOL to
maintain.

Say there are a few of my friends' directories and files that are of
general interest:

 /home/orion/jsmith/projectA/speech
 /home/magellan/tjones/lib/splib.a

With logical names, I could define the first as "joe" and the second as
"splib", and do things like:

 cd joe
 ls joe
 ar t splib
 cc myprog -lsplib

 as well as writing application programs that use them.  Environment
variables won't work unless you rewrite all your applications AND ALL
UNIX APPLICATIONS to do a getenv before every open (figure the odds!).
Symbolic links won't work for obvious reasons (they are global, users
would have to have write permission on root, they clutter up the file
system with permanent objects that really should be temporary, etc.).

Eduardo Krell of AT&T reports in Sun-spots v7n262 that Apollo's Unix
allows environment variable substitution inside symbolic links.  The
example is /usr/$(SYSTYPE)/bin, which allows users to select the flavor
of Unix they wish to run.  This is a step in the right direction, but
Unix is still deficient until it allows uniformly applied user-local
abbreviations for arbitrary locations in the filesystem name space.

   Dave Kemp <Kemp at dockmaster.ncsc.mil>