On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, David Laight wrote:

> > And to keep libraries where they have traditionally belonged (ie, in
> > /usr/lib) and only there.
> 
> How old is tradition?
> 
> I'm sure the first unix system I used had users filestore in /usr
> (ie home directories).

/usr/home I'd suspect.
Is there anything wrong with that? I occasionally still wan't to place it
there. Seems rather sensible.

> Unfortunately the disks weren't big enough to get all the system
> stuff into /, so chunks of it migrated.
> This isn't really necessary any more.

That was not the only, or even main reason. Even an RP06 holds 176 megs,
and those were the *old* days, and that was a rather common disk on
PDP-11s in those days. It was also pretty common to only have one disk, so
obviously the disk was large enough for everything, so the fact that you
had a small root partition was not because of disk size.
It was (just as the argument goes now) that you want a small, pretty
stable, safe and functional root file system, in case things go wrong.

You didn't even have arguments like nfs can only export whole filesystems,
since nfs didn't exist.

If we talk ultra-old, like release 5 or 6, when we only had RK05 (at 3.5
megs), we didn't even have partitions at that time.
Partitions came with larger disks...

> Shell performance would be improved by putting a little effort
> into making more commands builtin.

I'm looking forward to you doing this. It would be *most* welcome already
by those who run NetBSD on MicroVAX II systems, believe me.
Especially at boot time. You could probably save them somewhere around 10
minutes.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol