Re: Software/HD ecology

[Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>]

>>>>> "Kai" == Kai Großjohann <kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de> writes:

    Kai> We started in an environment where /usr/local was a directory
    Kai> which was managed by somebody else (the departmental
    Kai> computing center, on our SunOS 4.x workstations).  We used
    Kai> /usr/local/ls6 at that time, but felt the directory name was
    Kai> too long.  Later on, the departmental computing center
    Kai> changed to /app/unido-inf/sun4_56 (Solaris 2.6, no surprise),
    Kai> and so we used /app/unido-i06/sun4_56 which wasn't really any
    Kai> shorter either.

If you're on the command line:

        $ x=/app/unido-i06/sun4_56

and after that, you can:

        $ ls $x
        $ find $x -perm +0111
etc.


    Kai> Then, when we moved to GNU/Linux, we instinctively stayed
    Kai> away from all these directories I think and looked for
    Kai> something else.  I had seen /usr/sww (software warehouse) in
    Kai> some document on the internet and I liked that, so maybe
    Kai> that's why /usr/sw came about.

Users should not need to use  these pathnames so much.  Use aliases or
shell scripts.


    Kai> Why didn't we use /sw instead?  The reason is really silly:
    Kai> back on SunOS and Solaris, we used to mount /usr via NFS, so
    Kai> putting mount points under /usr was easier because we only
    Kai> had to create the directory on the NFS server.  But now with
    Kai> GNU/Linux, we don't distribute /usr via NFS...

Why not?  NFS-shared volumes are easier to manage if you have a large
network.  This is esp. true with softwares that you install from
source or tarballs, not package files.



-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee