Hi,

I'm currently designing a software quarantine pattern to use on Ubuntu. I'm not sure how standard "quarantine" is in this context, so here is what I hope to accomplish...

Inside a particular quarantine is all of the stuff one needs to run an application (bin, share, lib, etc.). Ideally, the quarantine has no leaks, which means it's not relying on any code outside of itself on the system. A quarantine can be defined as a set of executables (and some environment settings needed to make them run).

I think it will be beneficial to separate the built packages enough such that upgrading to a newer version of the quarantine won't require rebuilding the whole thing. I'll be able to update just a few packages, and then the new quarantine can use some of old parts and some of the new parts.

One issue I'm wondering about is the environment variables I'll be setting up to use a particular quarantines.

1. Is there a hard limit on how big PATH can be? (either in number of characters, or in the number of directories it contains)
2. Might a path be so long that it affects performance?

Thanks very much,

Andrew

p.s. Any other wisdom that might help my design would be greatly appreciated :)