Subject: standard directory hierarchy

From: [email-masked] (Orest Zborowski)
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 92 15:50:50 EST

i have a few thoughts on this directory issue:

1) linux is supposed to support posix - it does a pretty good job supporting
   posix.1, the os interface layer. there is a posix.2 which describes a bunch
   of utilities available from the shell. i'm not sure it has produced any
   standards document, but i do believe i've read about its progress in
   communications of the acm, and in ieee computer. this should be the
   authority.

2) following svr4 standards seems to be the logical next step. svr4 is truly
   posix compliant and posix seems to lean heavily to sysv for certain things
   like directory structure. bsd, especially sunos, is also moving towards
   svr4.

3) its true, certain applications have /lib/cpp burned into them and its gonna
   be difficult to remove it. even things like the standards can't remove that
   stain; you can move it (like sunos, which symlinks everything), but you can't
   remove it.

i think its a little naive to believe that we can come up with some special
directory hierarchy which is the be-all and end-all of structures, and then
we should change all these programs to conform. if you like, you can make
whatever changes you desire, like using symlinks to keep a partition readonly,
or shareable; changing the entry in /etc/passwd and make roots directory
/root, etc. for the standard distribution i would choose to make as few
changes from existing standards or existing implementations as possible.

zorst
[email-masked]