*BSD News Article 46152


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From: Jarkko.Hietaniemi@hut.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.browsers.x,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Netscape - this is ridiculous
Date: 24 Jun 1995 21:44:48 +0300
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
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>>The problem is, what if the administrator wants to move the global
>>mime.types and mailcap files?  Then what?
>
>	man ln. let me guess, everyone else here is a PC user,
>	and Rich is even posting from AT&T, the home of UNIX   :(

"ln" as in hard links?  Nah, our users are spread on three separate
filesystems, no can do. "ln" as in soft links?  Nah, the whole point
is that the system admin can change the global configuration if need
be (for example, for us, /usr/local does not exist. Period.) without
the users (11000 of those in our site) being bothered at all.
If the user's preferences would be a symlink to the root-owned
global preferences, the user would be might surprised and confused
if he tried to edit the file.  You might say: "why can't he a rm and
a cp" and then edit the file.  Remember, the point was that the user
should not have to do anything.

Having each user have a copy of the preferences file is madness,
most of them will not even modify it in any way, they just waste
disk space.  But if some global configuration change needs to be
done the administration has no other way than to edit all those
copies.

I don't understand the quip about PC users at all.  Very little
administrators and each of the thousands of users using that PC
having separate copies, I would say.  The idiocy of Netscape
not having a global preferences file has not a single good excuse.

++jhi;