Re: Support for architecture-independent binaries

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Reuben,

* Reuben Thomas wrote on Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 02:38:44PM CET:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/env interp-version
> 
> So are you saying it's unreasonable to expect that the interpreter for
> a particular program is necessarily in the user's path, and that
> absolute paths should always be baked in to launcher scripts?

No, I don't think I meant to say that.

What I meant to say was: there may be use cases for having a directory
for architecture-independent executable files (usually scripts), but the
number of files that would benefit from this is not very large, and the
files themselves are typically not very large either.  Thus sharing such
a directory between different architectures may have an organizational
advantage; but any space-saving advantage is likely to be minimal.

The organizational advantage might not be large enough to warrant
changing the GNU Coding Standards for this.  But Karl or RMS are
the ones you need to convince here, not me.

That said, I myself do have such a setup on one of the test systems:
$HOME/bin contains files like config.guess and config.sub, and both
that directory and $HOME/local/`config.guess`/bin are listed in PATH.

Cheers,
Ralf