On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Greywolf wrote:

> I think the point being brought up here is "why don't we wrapperize
> <x> to prevent third-party pre-emption of system utilities?" (MTA, DNS,
> printing, curses, the list could go on).

I think there is a good criterial that we can establish for what we wrap
and what we don't.

lpr programs (CUPS, etc.) are like sendmail in that they are typically
invoked by a number of different programs by execing lpr (or lp).

DNS, though, usually is either a stand-alone program (named) or is a stub
in libc (the built-in resolver). Curses packages, and many others, are
different in that they link right into a program - a program built against
one curses library won't necessarily work with a different one in the
system. So you can't really swap one for another on the fly.

So MTA and printing are in a middle ground. Other programs call/use them
directly (and thus path name/program name really matters) yet these
programs will, for the most part, work with any one of them (it's not like
a case where the program's different since the .h's are compiled in).

I think wrappers are fine, actually appropriate, for things in that middle
space.

Take care,

Bill