[MiNT] Proposition

[kellis <kellis@leading.net>]

quick question first:
00149488 : DCSD  
What is this cookie? anyone knows? found on an Hades060

Hi, I have come across the same thing along those years:
No constant define for env variable name.
It would be very handy for programers (AND users) to have 
predefined set of env variable, so that we can rely on.
Imagine $HOME not being $HOME only, but also $HOME_DIR available, and
$H_DIR this would make scripts harder to do, and not as compatible.
It is good that ONLY 1 known env variable has a special meaning.

The ones I am concerned about are like:
Browser, emailer, pop server, and such.

On the same level, mint/ multitos/ and auto/ for the possible location of
the file mint.cnf is not such a good idea in my opinion.
So far the only answer I got as why diff names was coz it looks nicer..

I, so far, use multitos, but if we all stick to 1 folder, I can change it
without any problem. Into MINT/ or FREEMINT for that matter.

If someone really wants to still use another directory, well, the src are
available and can be changed as will.

We have to understand that env variables (to come back to the first
subject) will have to have a special name because of GEM.
As in:

ftp_client = /usr/local/bin/ncftp
GEM_FTP = /usr/gem/bin/aftp.prg

In the sense that there is a need to have cli (unix school) + GEM ones

What I am asking is not to set everything for everyone, but at least for
people having a GEM ftp client, and want to declare it to the system/OS,
they have a real environment variable name. And not just made up. So we
can all share resources efficiently between programs.

I have seen for atari, some: $WWW_BROWSER, $URL_VIEWER, $CAB, $WWW_CLIENT
etc, fine, but we need to choose 1! :) I personally don't care about which
one, Just need to have one..
I hope you get the idea.

Same for POP server, I have seen, $POP_HOST, $POP_SERVER, $POP_HOSTNAME,
$POP_DAEMON etc etc (I made some up here ;)

This is a holy mess..
Some env variable can be shared between cli and GEM, like $HOSTNAME

I think it would be worthwhile to gather together a list about common env
variable name. 

(I do know that as a programer, it would make my life MUCH easier, and
more opportunity to intergrate nice things in my programs)

Thanx for reading.