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Re: hurd does NOT need /hurd



Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:

> Hrm? Why are you typing "/hurd/foo" in your settrans command instead of
> "/servers/foo" then? What's /servers for?

Speaking in "Unix speak" which is somewhat inaccurate, but gets the
basic idea across:

/servers is a set of standard names for mount points
/hurd is a set of programs that implement the filesystem protocol

/servers is for things that export only a single node, for which the
filesystem is basically used as a more or less pure rendezvous point,
to get to a server which is then manipulated by some mechanism other
than normal filesystem operations.

In other words:
/servers/foo is to /hurd/foo as TCP port 25 is to exim.

> They're referred to by the user, but they're not invoked by the user.

In one sense, no program on Linux is invoked by the user--only the
shell actually invokes the program, at the user's direction.

But part of understanding and using the Hurd effectively is thinking
of translators as being a new kind of "directly invoked" rather than
merely referred to.

> The same thing applies to the Hurd servers; with the exception that while
> they *could* go somewhere under /usr/lib (or /usr/libexec) they need
> to be much easier to reference. This latter thing could be achieved by
> having some sort of shorthand notation in all the cases where it matters
> (which is easy in debootstrap's case, but might be an annoying thing
> to have to retrofit with the Hurd), or to make a new, short, top-level
> directory (which you seem to have done twice).

I think you are right on target here.  (Except for the last little
bit, confusing /servers and /hurd, of course.)


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