Forgive my stupidity, but i thought Linux was based on the System V system and BSD (Berkley System Distribution) was a different flavour of Unix to Linux. Not all unices are the same but Linux is heading to the posix/LSB standard to make it easier for more program compatability.
Of course non-standard versions will and should occur where somebody thinks they have a better way. Time, testing and adoption practises hopefully will prevail in proving this correct or not (Advertising and monetary backing meant VHS prevailed over Beta). </newbie crawls off soapbox and hides under bed> I have noticed on my short time on this list that most questions should have been posted <newbie> first anyway. On Fri, 03 Jan 2003 22:11, Lyvim Xaphir wrote: > On Tue, 2002-12-31 at 18:50, Toshiro wrote: > > Are you sure? Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the idea that (at least a long > > time ago :) Slackware has a somewhat different directory layout > > (especially below the /etc directory). > > > > Anyone with recent experience with Slackware can confirm this? (I haven't > > used Slackware since 1995) > > You idea is dead right, especially in the context of /etc. Last time I > used Slackware, it was based on the BSD filesystem. Red Hat/Mandrake > use what's called the System V interface definition. In the past, the > Posix standard embraced the System V interface definition; one reason > for this was that the US government was tired of trying to make stuff > work across totally different Unix platforms, it got to be highly > inconvenient, to say the least. This inspired the US gov to adopt Posix > as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). As you can imagine > this was an inspiration for many Unix vendors to gain a sudden > partiality towards System V and Posix. > > Here's a layout of a BSD filesystem: > > http://www.washington.edu/R870/img/BSD-dir.gif > > Layout of System V: > > http://www.washington.edu/R870/img/V4-dir.gif > > System V filesystems are very highly organized and use directory > structure to great advantage in categorization, which is what it's > supposed to be used for. For instance, Sys V /etc uses subdirs to > categorize configuration and initialization files. Sys V /dev > categorizes device files in subs also as another example. > > BSD file structures *by contrast* are not very organized. In fact BSD > is kind of annoying, if you want to know the truth about it. One thing > that used to fry my eggs was the way everything was just dumped into > /etc; no subs. Another was the lack of a decent comprehensive organized > system of initialization files. I can pretty much nutshell it by saying > that the most annoying thing about BSD is that it's not System V. > > > -- > > Toshiro > > > > ---- > > --LX > > > P.S. Trivia -- Richard Stallman coined the term Posix (acronym for > Portable Operating Systems Interface for Unix) -- Michael
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