On Thu, Apr 01, 1999 at 10:57:47PM +0000, Michele Bini wrote: > If the Hurd philosophy wants to ignore /usr, why not to > ignore /sbin, too. > > [...] > > Leaving /sbin would make the filesystem structure > simpler, too. >
Another advantage would be that performance can be a lot boosted once shadowfs exists and supports asynch reading of different devices, while the PATH dirs are scanned sequentially (suppose having /sbin in a floppy and /bin in a ramdisk /usr in a cdrom in stand-by mode ..., and /usr/local nfs-mounted). Once we drop /usr, /sbin and /local all the PATH stuff (and the relative conffiles) becomes obsolete and can be dropped, too. If we decide instead to keep /bin, /sbin, /usr, even when we'll have shadowfs, the result, expecially for a user without any Unix experience would be confusing, as someone pointed out in his reply. Plus symlinking /sbin to /bin requires far less changes to the system than symlinking /usr to / (and, as Larry Wall said, laziness is virtue for a programmer, and, maybe, for a sysadmin) Compatibility with the current debian packaging scheme can not too hardly be kept by chrooting dpkg and non hurd compliant progs to a /var/debian or /var/fsstd path which would have proper translations to the root filesystem, so that the root filesystem itself would not be polluted by funny symlinks just for backward compatibility. -Michele
