>I have a bone of contention with the way everyone and his brother seems
>to want to mangle userland's layout.  The various Linuces don't agree on
>it; Debian is the closest one to being sane.  The various BSDs don't agree
>on it; NetBSD seems to be the only one to be sane, although the divergence
>is much less than, say, the other _commercial_ Unices which are even more
>diverse than the Linux userlands!  Am I making sense yet?  I mean,
>Solaris seems to be the closest stock system to being "sane",  for svr4.
>HP/UX, IRIX and the rest (modulo true svr4) are what they've always been:
>Special Interest Unices who figure that they can establish their own
>standards.  They _are_ big enough.  (Need I even mention AIX?)

(jumping in since the water's obviously warm enough :)

of all the different versions of unix i've seen, well...they're all
"confusing" in their layout of userland.  to some degree.  i simply
expect to be confused by linux (wait...it's over there now?), irked at
solaris (okay...which ln do i want this time?), and completely peeved
by sco (no more symlinks!  just binaries please!).

bsdi was the only bsd, however, where i shook my head and looked three
times.  it just struck me as weird.  it was very unlike the others in
placement of binaries, libraries, and header files.  took some getting
used to.

i expect programs to move eg, ping (/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin),
traceroute (solaris doesn't stock one), and other mild things (never
mind linux's netinet header files), but a /shlib directory was just
wacky.  and having two wildly different c compilers struck me as
bizarre.

i'm glad they're getting together (all politics aside) and i think it
will be a "good thing", but i see a lot of work ahead.

-- 
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