uucp cleanup script (SysVr4.0)

[Guy Harris]

>Symbolic links are essential because System V.4 was designed by a
>committee.

Well, actually, symbolic links are in S5R4 because they're in
4.2andupBSD.

>Obviously, nobody could agree, and everybody wanted things
>in a "familiar" place.

The choice was made in several OSes, not just S5R4, to reorganize the
file system somewhat; the first OS to use the new organization was SunOS
4.0, and I think Ultrix may have picked it up as well; 4.4BSD may do so
also, as the Berkeley folk were part of the group that decided on the
changes.

The symbolic links that point to the old places are there for the
benefit of both programs and people that haven't converted yet.

>It would have been _far_ better to document the location of
>everything, and to keep it in a consistent place.

Umm, that's an interesting suggestion, but what does it mean?

Do you mean that they should have documented the locations a long time
ago, and not moved things?  Unfortunately, some of those locations
weren't ideal, in that, for example, stuff that could be shared by
diskless clients and stuff that would be per-client was mixed together
on various file systems.

One original motivation for the file system reorganization was to make
it a bit more pleasant to support diskless clients (that was certainly
one of Rusty's motivations for pushing the idea in the first place), so
that the root and (later) "/var" file systems would contain stuff that
would generally be per-client and the "/usr" file system could contain
stuff that would be shareable by all clients.  An additional consequence
of that split is that, if done right, you can mount "/usr" read-only.

Few, if any, changes are entirely devoid of bad consequences, but that
doesn't mean few, if any, changes should be made....