Re: Software/HD ecology

[jdf23 <jdf23@some.email>]

Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

>     Anil> I think unix was conceptualized for small systems and
>     Anil> programs, where a user might know every file, where it came
>     Anil> from, what it does. 
> 
> Wrong.  Unix  has been designed  to be a  multi-concurrent-user system
> since  3 decades  ago.   Unix  systems used  to  be time-shared  among
> hundreds (in some cases thousands) of concurrent users.  Normally, the
> end users only  know about a few subtree of  the whole directory tree,
> and that's enough for his work.

Your sense of history is different. Some of us remember when you
couldn't find "hundreds" of people who knew what unix was, and in unix
at least, end users and beginning users were the same people. Even when
hundreds of users materialized, they didn't have FSF to download
programs from.

> That why we hav package management tools, like RPM on RedHat and SuSE.

Good for Red Hat and SuSE. Has it occured to you that there are other
flavors of Linux, other versions of Unix, not to forget Mac OS X since
the lead newsgroups in this thread are Mac groups?

>     Anil> Shouldn't you be able to know just what a particular file
>     Anil> named "dtabttf" doing on your system?  
> Unix programmers would have used a more descriptive filenames.

Merely from looking at their names, I certainly can't always decipher
what many of the unix files do. Nor can I always guess which program
they might come form.

> rpm -qf /etc/ntpd.conf

No good on most Unix or even Linux systems.