It is a very well established convention that words represent what they mean, and their description is found in a good dictionary. If you change the meaning of a word, in a dictionary of your own, the rest of the world will not understand what you say.
hostname is a very well established word in official industry standards, and it does not mean "this is where you write the configuration of network interfaces". Forcing a slang in your tribe just makes you look exactly what you are: a minority that requires a linguistic overhead and a lot of patience. -------- Original Message -------- On 4/8/25 09:55, Michael Hekeler <mich...@hekeler.com> wrote: > > You think of hostname, look for /etc/hostname, and find something > unrelated. > > The file /etc/hostname does not exist. > > The files /etc/hostname.if do exist, but have nothing to do with the host > name. > > By comparison, in linux /etc/hostname exists and serves the intended > purpose. > > This is not intuitive. > > To understand where the host name is written in OpenBSD, you need to read > hostname(1). > > According to hostname(1) and /etc/rc, the file /etc/myname is responsible > for holding the name of a host. > > Why diverging from intuition? > > There is no such thing like an "intuition". > The hostname persists within a data structure in the kernel, > while the system is running. During a system's boot this information can > be reattained through a variety of mechanisms that is typically OS > specific. > Whether an OS saves this name in a variable in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf > or somewhere else is not important - any persistance mechanism is only > read once at boot time to initialize the kernel hostname. > > Linux people decided to invent a file called /etc/hostname which YOU think > its intuitive > According to uname(3) this string is named 'nodename' and thats why I > think Sun OS's /etc/nodename was the most intuitive. > So we have two definitions of intuitive now - who will win? > >
