Re: GNOME universe

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Navindra Umanee <navindra@CS.McGill.CA> writes:

> Makes sense but what's not clean about /usr/bin/X11/ and
> /usr/lib/X11/ and /usr/include/X11/ ?  I guess there's a lot of crud
> there that needs to be organized...

According to the "one true way" :>, all normal bins should be a set of
directories where the contents directories are not distinguished by
which software pacakge they come from, but rather a few important,
cross-package issues:

  /sbin for admin stuff that has to be available before /usr is mounted
  /bin for stuff that has to be available before /usr is mounted
  /usr/sbin for admin stuff
  /usr/bin for everything else

> > term agenda.  In fact, with something like the HURD, the whole / /usr
> > division is pointless and shouldn't exist.
> 
> Could you explain?  What's different with HURD in this respect?

The reasons we have the / /usr split are historical and practical.
Back in the early days there was a small amount of fast "disk", and a
larger amount of slow disk.  On one of the early systems, I believe
the latter was actually a large rotating drum.  You wanted to have the
stuff that needed to be faster in /.  Today, practically speaking, you
want / to be small and separate from /usr so you can hopefully limit
the likelihood that a critical failure will hit the tools you need to
deal with a critical failure.

>From what I've heard this becomes irrelevant in the HURD because it
has a much more sophisticated filesystem.  You can "interleave" mount
points, so one partition can provide some of the files in /bin, and
another partition can provide the rest (once it's mounted).  Perhaps
something like:

  mount /dev/foo1 /    # For normal root files.
  mount /dev/foo2 /    # add normal /usr files.

Though I have no idea how this is actually set up, and I don't know
how potential name conflicts are resolved...

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930