At 5:37 AM -0600 11/23/2000, Gabriel Paubert wrote: [...] >I agree that power management status/log should go to /var. On the other >hand /etc has to be on the root fs for several reasons (/etc/inittab among >others is quite important): IOW you don't use a separate mount point for >/etc unless you want to play dirty tricks with init. > >Of cuorse there is a precedent for modifying /etc: /etc/mtab, but >admittedly for good reasons. mount also puts lock files in /etc and has to >have these funky option (-n and -f) to work around the chicken and egg >problem of initial read only root filesystem mount by the kernel. Once you >have these option I don't see any reason not to have /var/mtab instead for >example but maybe I miss something. > >Now /etc/mtab is also somewhat redundant with /proc/mounts. Actually you >should be able to link /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts but it raises a lot of >problems and does not work satifactorily in my experience. [...]
I think technically the /proc filesystem is optional. Requiring /proc for mount to function gives you another fun chicken + egg of how the heck do you then mount /proc on startup? ;) At the risk of drifting way off topic, it might be worth looking at rewriting mount and fellow /etc/mtab users to just never need to use a file like /etc/mtab. I can particularily recall a few times where a stale, unwritable /etc/mtab made some system reconfiguration and/or system recovery about 5 times more annoying than it needed to be. 30 years of unix tradition be damned, /etc/mtab sucks. As for pmud, why not use a socket interface for everything? Using loopback tcp in one place and a file in another place seems a bit silly to me. Cheers - Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler :) -- Tony "Nicoya" Mantler - Renaissance Nerd Extraordinaire - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada -- http://nicoya.feline.pp.se/
