[rescue] Re:EMACS

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, June 29, 2001 at 01:00:12 (+0200), Sebastian Marius Kirsch wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Re:EMACS
>
> But you said that you are more comfortable with RedHat, which is odd --
> NetBSD and FreeBSD use a distinctly BSD-like filesystem structure (after
> all, they *are* true BSDs), while most major Linux distributions
> (including RedHat and Debian) follow the filesystem hierarchy standard
> more or less closely. Perhaps you will be more comfortable with them if
> you take a few minutes to glance over the FHS; see
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs.

I think you're suffering tunnel vision rather badly.

The FHS is, for all intents and purposes, almost identical to *BSD's hier(7)

Yeah, there are some nit-picky little inconsequential differences, and
obviously more detail and explanation, but there's not much else of
major difference except maybe for the choice of /opt vs. /usr/local.

> Personally, I am more confused by the idiosyncrasies of the different
> SVR4 variants. Solaris' /opt and /usr/ucb, 'init 0/6' for
> shutdown/reboot and *hard links* in /etc/rc*.d are confusing to say the
> very least. Irix is even worse, with binaries and scripts scattered over
> the whole system (at least in my experience) -- shutdown in
> /etc/shutdown, ping in /usr/etc/, a separate hierarchy /usr/gfx for all
> things graphics-related etc. The SVR4 systems are all far from being
> consistent.

If you look at the original AT&T UNIX System V porting base instead of
the various bastardisations and abominations of it (IRIX isn't even the
worst, and SunOS-5 is really quite bad itself), you might see how the
various vendors have diverged.  If USL hadn't died more or less as it
was being born I think the SysV vendors would have been reigned in a bit
more.  Almost every vendor with a legacy unix pre-dating their adoption
of SysVr4 thought they had to make concessions to their legacy users.
Pyramid is/was probably one of the better examples of a vendor who did
not make such concessions and who really did try to stay true to the
porting base.

It's also very very very important to remember that commercial unix
vendors see many of these differences as important features of their
systems, features that they hope to use to carve themselves a bigger
niche in the marketplace.  The divergences amongst GNU/Linux (and *BSD)
distributions is driven by some of the same needs, but in the freeware
communities  there's much less pressure to diverge and much more
pressure to converge (which is partly why the FHS looks so much like
*BSD! :-)

Now of course if you want a really clean hierarchy that's not tied to
the original restrictions of 5MB disk packs, you might do well to look
at Plan 9 in more detail.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>