Re: GNUstep directory layout

[Pascal Bourguignon]

> From: "Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf" <Lars.Sonchocky-Helldorf@bbdo-interone.de>
> Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 16:32:22 +0200
> 
> >> /Users, and Mac OS X has /Users.  Normally, the users are kept out of
> >> any directory like /usr because /usr is, in many environments, mounted
> >
> >I feel *so* old - when I started using UNIX the home directories were
> >kept in /usr as it stood for "users" :-) I suspect that the other
> 
> Uhmm, are you sure about this? IHMO usr stands for Unix System Resources, 
> and this explains also why bin and lib are there.

IMHO, 

/bin /dev /etc  /lib /tmp where installed and  managed by the original
Unix distributions.

/usr  was  "reserved" to  the  user.  That is,  an  upgrade  or a  new
installation of Unix would not erase what was in /usr.

Then some nice programmers at  BSD and elsewhere developped nice tools
and installed  them in:  /usr/bin, /usr/lib, ...  Progressively, these
nice tools being  so nice, they were integrated  to some distributions
of  Unix (BSD for  example), and  thus /usr  became itself  a "system"
directory.  But this was not the initial intent, AFAIK.


That said, your "Unix System Resources" is worth remembering, nowaday.


> >directories such as bin and lib ended up there by accident, and that
> >the tail ended up wagging the dog as people decided to move the home 
> directories
> >elsewhere rather than find a sensible place to keep the stuff that doesnt
> >really belong under /usr
> >
> >but thats UNIX evolution for you :-)
> >
> >-bat. [as a completely off topic note - when *did* home directories move
> >       out of /usr ? sometime around BSD 4.1ish ?]
> 
> Lars


-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__                   http://www.informatimago.com/
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 The name is Baud,...... James Baud.