Re: CVS_USER

[Derek R. Price]

Jim Kingdon wrote:

> CGI uses environment variables to pass things to the scripts, and I
> guess I don't really see a problem with using environment variables.
> Although they seem to be non-portable, they aren't, really.  NT and
> VMS have them (or something which the libraries make look the same to
> the programs), for example.

CGI might have one already, but designing a new API will mean coming up
with some well defined way of passing lists.  This is easier using the
*info stuff I wrote because each item becomes a single argument to the
child process and stepping through argv is a relatively simple way to
parse arguments.

Also, it sounds like with this method large lists would be processed and
placed in the environment regardless of whether the child was going ot
use them or not.  i.e. CVS could go through and place a 1000 item list of
filenames in the environment for a script called from taginfo even though
the script was only going to check whether the user was on a list of
admin users.

Granted, with the speed of computers nowadays this might not take all
that long, but I generally like to avoid that kind of overhead unless
there's a good reason.  Is the general opinion that this overhead is
within acceptable tolerances (or worth the ease of use of the API)?

Derek

--
Derek Price                      CVS Solutions Architect ( http://CVSHome.org )
mailto:address@hidden     OpenAvenue ( http://OpenAvenue.com )
--
106.  Charlie was a Chemist, but Charlie is no more.
      What Charlie thought was H20 was H2SO4.