On 15 Jan 1999, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > "M.C. Vernon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I disagree here (nb - I am not a compsci). I think to begin with we should > > have the /usr dichotamy, with the intention to change it later, when hurd > > no longer has to worry so much about being linux compatible. > > I think the problem with this could best be explained by reference to > history: > > /usr goes back at least to V6 Unix, and it was the place to put user > home directories. At some point some large binaries started to be > popular, and /usr/bin showed up as a temporary hack, with the > expectation that the root filesystem would get expanded. > > You can see how well the "change it later" strategy worked there.
And /usr/bin is such a terrible cludge. It impairs performance terribly, and makes the sysadmins job a nightmane </sarcasm> Seriously though - It might have been intended to change it, but I don't personally see it as a practicle problem. > I think we should patch the small number of packages that have a real > problem, and move on. We can create Hurd-specific patches for them, > and submit them for consideration in general. I'm happy if the > general packages just did [ ! -l /usr ] or whatever. I don't have any > interest in trying to tell the ae package that they should not create > /usr/bin/vi, but I do think we could say "please don't create > /usr/bin/vi on Debian GNU/Hurd" and make it with a suitably generic > test. I don't think you have grounds to say "small"[1]. Part of the problem is that we (as hurd developers) do not have the weight (i.e. a production system) to throuw around to try and get a number of linux packages patched so they cross-compile neatly when our only justification is philosophy. I see the future of hurd as moving away from unix/linux, but not just yet. To being with, we must try and get lots of stuff ported, and implement all the desirable features in hurd (I want to re-implement mach as well, but that's another matter for some years off) first. Then we are in a position to move on. It's just a case of making sure we do move on - otherwise hurd will be 'just another linux'. It takes a bit of vision, and a lot of discipline, to do things like remove the symlink, with the intention of putting it back in the future, but I think it is the best way forwards. Gently gently - we want to win linux developers over, not alienate them Yours, Matthew [1]: there are 2000+debian packages. Have you checked them all? My system only has 526 on it - about 25% -- Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo Steward of the Cambridge Tolkien Society Selwyn College Computer Support http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/8841/ http://www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/Societies/tolkien/ http://pick.sel.cam.ac.uk/
