File Sys Hierarchies

[Barry Shein]

From: Root Boy Jim <rbj at dsys.ncsl.nist.gov>
>One thing that is weird about the root file system is that it has
>no name. So, let's move everything into /root. NOTHING goes into
>the / directory except mount points, and directorys are automagically
>created when mounts are made, and disappear when unmounted.

The main motivation to put things into root was to make it easy for a
boot program to find what it needed without having to grovel the
directory hierarchy.

Also that a very minimal number of directories and files have to be
alive to get a system up, in emergency (remember the days when we'd
have to patch the file system back together just to get it to the
point that we had a shell and start really fixing the mess.)

Most of this may be anachronism, some vendors have ROMs these days
which can do 'cd's, 'ls's and other file ops w/o Unix even running
yet. Obviously things have changed from the days when a PDP-11 boot
prom would suck in the 512 bytes of block zero and jump to it and
you'd have to get the system started with that 512 bytes of code (I've
written a few of those, it is fun in a masochistic way...)

Anyhow, one wants to carefully balance between convenience and
robustness under fire. I agree it would be nice if someone came up
with some basic directory hierarchy which all vendors would please
use. They seem to accept /bin and /usr/bin as givens (most of them
anyhow), some rational standard for more (boot files, mount points
etc) would be nice. It's certainly a very silly area for a vendor to
get creative, yet they do...

	-Barry Shein

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