On Sun, 12 Mar 2000, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > It's your choice to install them. They are not essential to make it > possible to install further packages, so they are not in the base (the > base is > 12 MB, big enough for an initial installation).
Okay, I was confused as to the contents of the tarball on alpha.gnu.org. =) > > it seems like a patently bad idea to have "/usr -> ."; shouldnt' > > it be "/usr -> /"? > What's the difference from a users point of view, when you have booted > the Hurd? I suppose, not much at all... so long as the user's have the programs they want, and get the results they want, you're right. > There is actually a good reason for a relative pathname: If you mount > your hurd partition on /gnu or somewhere else, using an absolute path > will lead to a wrong /gnu/usr. This is especially dangerous when cross > compiling. Again, something I had not thought of. Thank you. > > why not have a /usr, anyway? Perhaps it's just my years of having > > "normal" unix systems to grow up in, but I find this quite odd. > The correct question is: Why have /usr? And then realizing that on the > Hurd those reasons are or will become non-issues. I suppose it's just been ingrained after years of using "normal" unix systems: /bin, /sbin, /lib and such are there to contain only the bare necessities to get the system running, or boot up when only the root filesystem has survived a thrashing. everything else can go under /usr. "optional" software packages go in /opt, and packages local to a specific machine go in /usr/local (should /usr happen to be a networked filesystem.) It's a nice system; it makes sense (though whether to install something in /usr/local or /opt can be confusing). I have noticed, though, that HP-UX 11 has /bin, /sbin and /lib as symlinks to /usr/bin, /usr/sbin and /usr/lib, which worries me, because it also likes to install the OS with seperate / and /usr filesystems. But it is an effort, I suppose, to do the same thing as symlinking /usr to . (root), just backwards... > Or change the permissions of /etc/passwd to restrict it to logged in > users. There is no official way to do this right now, as chmod doesn't > have symbolic tags for these bits, but you can look at bits/stat.h and > use octal Ahh.. As anyone out there played with this? If not, I might well attempt the modification of chmod as a first crack at helping out with the development effort. (Got to start somewhere, right? =) -- Gregory Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Find PGP public key at http://www.pgp.com (Key ID 0x63B57600) #include <standard/disclaim.h> procmail(1) is your friend.
