On Wed, Jun 28, 2000 at 07:52:58AM -0400, Wade Hampton wrote:
> I would much rather have a fixed recommendation so if I have to
> administer a Caldera box, a Slakware box, a RedHat box, etc.,
> the mount points would be esentially the same, out of the box.
I'd like to be able to sit down at a Windows box and have it act just
the same as my Debian box at home, too. But it's not going to happen.
And having /mnt and /floppy be the same everywhere is the least of your
worries as a sysadmin amongst various boxen (eg, compare working out how
to mount a floppy somewhere to working out how networking is setup amongst
Red Hat (pre and post linuxconf), Debian (pre and post ifupdown), and,
say, Slackware). For mount point, at the absolute *worst* you can just
mkdir -p /tmp/mymounts/floppy
mount /dev/fd0 /tmp/mymounts/floppy
and not have to worry at all about what you're "meant" to use.
Demanding everyone with /mnt/floppy change to someone else doesn't help
you at all, and inconveniences the x000 existing RedHat admins out there
who have to change their systems.
If you're really worried about what you have to write in your
documentation write something like this:
We will assume you are going to install from
/tmp/foobar_cd_install. If you know what you're doing and have
a different mountpoint you prefer to use, that's fine.
mkdir -p /tmp/foobar_cd_install
mount /dev/hd3 /tmp/foobar_cd_install
cd /tmp/foobar_cd_install
lsb-pkg --install foobar_1.0.lsb
Even better, say something like:
For LSB compliant systems, the package you need to install is
called "foobar_1.0.lsb". Please consult your distribution manuals
for complete instructions on how to install this package.
Good distributions will presumably let you run an LSB-installer GUI tool
of some sort, select a [CD ROM] icon, mount the right CD device in the
right place, look for .lsb files, and let you choose which ones you want
to install. That should be trivially easy to implement, trivially easy
to use, and trivially easy for the distributions to document.
And for the clued admin who has to flit between distributions, well,
we can always resort to making our own mount directory out of the way
somewhere and using the command line tools. No big deal.
At any rate, if Slackware and Debian suck so much that they can't offer
neat easy tools to make newbies' lives easy, that's their problem. Why
should Red Hat or Mandrake or whoever have to suffer because of it?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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