Re: SEUL: SOTs comments

[Graydon Hoare <graydon@pandect.com>]

On Thu, 4 Sep 1997, Magnus Lycka wrote:

> It's very good that we have a lot of people on this list from the DOS / 
> Windows world, who aren't already used to Unix and find these strange 

please do not be patronizing, i am no less a unix geek than you. i am
merely talking about non-unix users. don't waste your time trying to tell
me the logic of the unix filesystem. the names were arbitrarily chosen to
reflect a situation which does not exist in any home, anywhere in the
world. bin doesn't "make sense" for programs, and neither does
/usr/local/bin -- they're conventions of the unix world, and make no
sense to anyone from outside. macs and windows machines are technical
failures, not because of their naming conventions but because their code
sucks.

imagine naming things based on a natural language. can you imagine it?
take a deep breath, hold off on the flaming, imagine I am your conscience
talking to you on the first day you ever used a unix machine, lo those
hundred long years ago, and you are looking around for the configuration
files. 

the word "etc" is not what comes into your head. face it.

> I appreciate the point, but I'm sure that the correct technical solution
> to this does not involve changing the standard directory structure.

no. as another user of the list mentionned, it involves chrooting them
and having pleasing names point to things outside their home directory.
but I don't know if that works -- chroot is being bitchy at me at the
moment.

--real filesystem------///--user's view of chroot("/home/username")--
                        |
/bin, /usr/bin...       | /programs
/var/spool/mail/user    | /email
/etc/profiles/user      | /preferences
/lib                    | ___________
/boot                   | *invisible*
/proc                   | ~~~~~~~~~~~

is there union-fs support in the kernel yet? 

-graydon <graydon@pobox.com>