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Re: Is there an alternative filesystem hierarchy that could be adapted to Debian.



Joe wrote: 
> There was a time when 'software' and 'applications' were two different
> and distinct things, when applications were user programs and software
> was the set of programs that made the computer work, today called system
> software. A computer as delivered contained both hardware and software,
> and it was up to the owner to write the applications. OK, that's going
> back a bit...


Once upon a time there were programmers. Frequently they had to
build the hardware that they programmed -- indeed, it was a bit
of a luxury to only be a programmer, and not also have
responsibility for hardware maintenance (or design).

Then there were systems programmers and application programmers.
Systems programmers wrote operating systems and utilities for
them. Applications programmers wrote applications. There was a lot of crossover.

Then there were operators, systems programmers and application
programmers. Operator was a junior position that did physical
things (mount tapes, plug in cables) and ran commands to do
things on the systems. They usually moved up to being --

Systems administrators, who did some programming in service to
the systems, but not too much. The more senior a sysadmin was,
the more time they spent programming and the less time they
spent doing physical things, unless they wanted to do that.

Sysadmins started to specialize. People who configured switches
and routers and talked to telephone companies became
"network engineers". People who spent time working on
firewalls and security policies and thinking about that became
"security engineers". Junior people who read scripts to
end users became the helpdesk. And so forth.

Then we noticed that a bunch of people were doing things
manually when they should be automated. This was especially bad
in places where there were no senior sysadmins or systems
programmers. But we did have the internet, and senior sysadmins
got together and started writing tools to make their lives
easier: infrastructure automation. Current tools for that
include chef, puppet, ansible, salt...

(all of this is largely quoting myself circa April 2016)

-dsr-


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