*BSD News Article 51824


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From: nickkral@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Nick Kralevich)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: File hierarchy (was Re: Linux or FreeBSD)
Date: 22 Sep 1995 07:23:03 GMT
Organization: Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department, University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 70
Message-ID: <43to8n$2so@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <409iah$inf@galaxy.ucr.edu> <43klfh$2sg@uriah.heep.sax.de> <43ltqq$3k1@agate.berkeley.edu> <43pvh8$c6j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: parker.eecs.berkeley.edu

In article <43pvh8$c6j@uriah.heep.sax.de>,
J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> wrote:
>The last Linux distribution i've seen (some Slackware derivative) had
>tons of binaries under /etc, 

The current slackware has *no* binaries under /etc.  For as long as 
I've used Slackware, I've never seen a binary under /etc.  You must
have been viewing some wierd distribution of Linux, definitely not
based on either Slackware, Red Hat (Caldera), or Yggridisal (sp?). 

>and the tool to remount the root file
>system read/write was well-hidden somewhere under /etc/remount/.  

hercules:~> more /etc/rc.d/rc.S
[deleted]
 # Remount the root filesystem in read-write mode
 echo "Remounting root device with read-write enabled."
 /sbin/mount -w -n -o remount /
[deleted]

/etc/rc.d/rc.S is one of the startup scripts.  

>(The man page was from BSD, btw. :-)

Not under any current distribution of Linux.

>I admit that this is a simple snapshot observation, but unfortunately,
>this inconsistency seems to be somewhat typical for several Linux
>distributions.

For a person who usually posts very well thought out answers, I can't
believe that you would post such a thing.  The Linux distributions
are very standardized.  It is very easy to move from one Linux
distribution to another without problems.  All of the major 
distributors of Linux are trying their best to comply with the
Linux File System Standard, which dates back to Feb 1994
(the current version is dated Mar 29, 1995).

If you have seen a recent distribution that has serious 
inconsistancies, I invite you to post examples.  Vague generalities
don't have that much weight in arguments.

Since this is a FreeBSD newsgroups, I'll post some FreeBSD questions:

=====-----
Does FreeBSD have any file system standard as comprehensive as 
the Linux File System Standard? (yes, I know about "man hier".  The 
key word here is "comprehensive").  For reference and comparison, the 
text version of the Linux File System Standard is located at 
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/fsstnd/fsstnd-1.2.txt

=====-----
There currently is only one FreeBSD distribution.  Therefore,
all of the FreeBSD distributions have exactly the same file system
layout (where all == one).  

1)  Does the FreeBSD team support/want multiple distributions 
of the FreeBSD operating system?

2)  Assuming that there are multiple distributions of the
FreeBSD operating system, how will it be possible to maintain
consistancy between different versions?  Different versions are
going to want to add different applications to different places.
The existing file system documentation ("man hier") is not 
sufficient to deal with this.  

Take care,
-- Nick Kralevich
   nickkral@cory.eecs.berkeley.edu