From Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Tue May 20 15:31:57 1997
From: Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 16:31:57 +0200
Subject: R-alpha: Re unified shell script
Message-ID: <199705201431.QAA27356@aragorn.ci.tuwien.ac.at>

Some time ago there was the suggestion to add a PLATFORM subdir level
for bin (and eventually the library subdirs with `binaries'), and the
idea to have the shell wrapper automagically call the right binary.

I mentioned that one might be able to use the shell variables OSTYPE and
HOSTTYPE for that, noticing however that e.g on my Debian Linux/GNU/ix86

		bash	tcsh
OSTYPE		Linux	linux
HOSTTYPE	i386	i386-linux

Hmm ... It seems (a colleague just checked that) that these variables
are not POSIX either, and hence I'd say rather useless for our purpose.

In the absence of a reliable run-time possibility to determine the
current platform, it seems to be natural to use `platform' as obtained
at compile-time for possibly distinguishing the various binaries etc,
and leave it at the discretion of the sysadmin to ensure that the R
script in the path calls the right binary.

If I am missing something obvious, please let me know.

-k
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R-alpha: Re unified shell script
Kurt Hornik