The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments http://www.mit.edu/people/wsanchez/papers/USENIX_2000/ More tech-head stuff. One excerpt: "Unix has a heavy reliance on file paths. One of many such examples is the Bourne shell: if the sh program does not exist in /bin, the system won't even boot properly. While Mac OS is not immune from such problems, it does allow the user to relocate or rename even such important items as the System Folder. This is a particularly significant issue because, although we use BSD as the core system software, we do not want to require our users to understand how BSD works. Ideally, the typical Macintosh user does not even know that BSD is there. The very presence of such folders as "usr" and "etc" on disk is therefore awkward, and we hide those directories and their contents at the application level in order to avoid confusion as to why they are there and cannot be moved or deleted. One idea is to put all system files into a Mac OS-style System Folder, and make that folder opaque to the user. This requires that there be other methods for managing the system software than allowing users to poke in there themselves, and we still have the problem that standard Unix paths are required to exist at the root level of the boot volume. This is still an area which we are actively working to improve upon." -- ---> jabtronic / http://commie.oy.com "We Make Listening Complicated!" (tm)
