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Re: Package questions



On Sun, 12 Mar 2000, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:

> It's your choice to install them. They are not essential to make it
> possible to install further packages, so they are not in the base (the
> base is > 12 MB, big enough for an initial installation).

Okay, I was confused as to the contents of the tarball on alpha.gnu.org.
=)

> > it seems like a patently bad idea to have "/usr -> ."; shouldnt'
> > it be "/usr -> /"?

> What's the difference from a users point of view, when you have booted
> the Hurd?

I suppose, not much at all... so long as the user's have the programs they
want, and get the results they want, you're right.

> There is actually a good reason for a relative pathname: If you mount
> your hurd partition on /gnu or somewhere else, using an absolute path
> will lead to a wrong /gnu/usr. This is especially dangerous when cross
> compiling.

Again, something I had not thought of.  Thank you.

> > why not have a /usr, anyway?  Perhaps it's just my years of having
> > "normal" unix systems to grow up in, but I find this quite odd.
> The correct question is: Why have /usr? And then realizing that on the
> Hurd those reasons are or will become non-issues.

I suppose it's just been ingrained after years of using "normal" unix
systems: /bin, /sbin, /lib and such are there to contain only the bare
necessities to get the system running, or boot up when only the root
filesystem has survived a thrashing.  everything else can go under /usr.  
"optional" software packages go in /opt, and packages local to a specific
machine go in /usr/local (should /usr happen to be a networked
filesystem.)  It's a nice system; it makes sense (though whether to
install something in /usr/local or /opt can be confusing).

I have noticed, though, that HP-UX 11 has /bin, /sbin and /lib as symlinks
to /usr/bin, /usr/sbin and /usr/lib, which worries me, because it also
likes to install the OS with seperate / and /usr filesystems.  But it is
an effort, I suppose, to do the same thing as symlinking /usr to . (root),
just backwards...

> Or change the permissions of /etc/passwd to restrict it to logged in
> users. There is no official way to do this right now, as chmod doesn't
> have symbolic tags for these bits, but you can look at bits/stat.h and
> use octal

Ahh.. As anyone out there played with this?  If not, I might well attempt
the modification of chmod as a first crack at helping out with the
development effort. (Got to start somewhere, right? =)

-- 
Gregory Ade <gkade@bigbrother.net>
Find PGP public key at http://www.pgp.com (Key ID 0x63B57600)
#include <standard/disclaim.h>
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