On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 07:48:37PM -0500, Benjamin Scott wrote:
>
> > ... I'll point out that BIND is an acronym, which when correctly written
> > (at least in the English language) is ALWAYS all in upper case ...
>
> But, on Unix systems, most things tend to be written in all lower case, even
> when they are acronyms or proper nouns. This convention appears to override
> "proper English" [1] in the vast majority of cases.
That's certainly true of things like the names of programs and of
function names. However, while there was this thing called BIND,
there was never a program associated with that thing that had the name
bind. BIND is not a program. It's a bunch of stuff, or perhaps a
suite of tools, if you prefer, which was written to implement the DNS
spec.
I'd guess that it's still called BIND because it's still maintained by
Paul Vixie (with lots of help from other folks who develop for ISC),
who has maintained it since it was at Berkeley, and I suppose because
he hasn't felt there's been any compelling reason to change the
name... And after all, reletively few well-established products ever
change their names... right?
I don't see anything overly logically inconsistent about the naming of
named either; named serves names, just as timed serves time... :)
The naming of Unix programs has never been exactly what one would call
user-friendly. At least these somewhat indicate what the purpose of
the program is! If you didn't already know, what would you guess that
awk or dd did? But why change it now? The only thing I think this
really would accomplish is to confuse lots of people, and to somewhat
reduce the character of that which we call Unix. Personally, I kinda
like the quirky names. And named is much easier to type than
something "more intuitive" such as dns_name_server.
BTW, for those who are still actually reading this thread, there's a
nice little history of DNS/BIND in Evi Nemeth's sysadmin bible[1]. If
you really care, go check it out. :)
[1] Unix System Administrator's Handbook, chapter 15.
--
We sometimes catch a window, a glimpse of what's beyond
Was it just imagination stringing us along?
---------------------------------------------------
Derek Martin | Unix/Linux geek
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