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To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
cc: perry@piermont.com, thorpej@nas.nasa.gov, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de,
        hackers@freebsd.org, port-i386@netbsd.org, darrenr@cyber.com.au
Subject: how to name fs specific programs
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 25 Mar 1997 15:57:10 MST."
             <199703252257.PAA26124@phaeton.artisoft.com> 
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
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Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 18:19:33 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
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Terry Lambert writes:
> > It is arguable whether it is better to say ffs_mount or mount_ffs, but
> > frankly it doesn't matter much, and having picked one there is no good
> > reason to break people by switching
> > 
> > This isn't the sort of thing that is so critical that there is a
> > reason to be gratuitously incompatible with what another BSD is doing,
> > and 4.4lite set the precedent.
> 
> BSD4.4-Lite arguably screwed up FS modularity in many ways.
> 
> This is one of them.
> 
> If all our friends jumped off a bridge, should we?  Like our friends
> from the bridge, CSRG is quite dead.

Look, this is a fairly trivial item. You need to pick one of the two
naming schemes. There are arguments for both. The benefits of either
over the other are fairly insignificant.

Well, one has already been picked.

If you want to gratuitously reduce compatibility of FreeBSD with BSDI,
NetBSD and OpenBSD, thats fine, but there is no rational reason to
consider this to be so important that switching the order makes
sense. All the mount commands are already mount_${fsname}, for
example. If you don't want to go along with that, well, fine, but I'm
afraid I don't see the benefit -- whereas I do see a larger learning
curve, broken scripts and executables, and a dozen other reasons not
to be gratuitously incompatible.

> The only reasonably uniform mechanism for modular insertion/deletion
> of supported file systems from an OS involves grouping the files by FS.

Your computer doesn't care what the names of the files are. Any
reasonable package system (including the FreeBSD one) can handle sets
of arbitrarily named files and add or remove them at will. Thats one
of the reasons you have package systems.

> Ideally, the grouping should be done on a directory basis rather than
> a prefix basis so that only a single point of adjustment is necessary
> to perform the insertion or deletion.

Your proposal would have made sense BEFORE everyone else picked a
scheme. However, the benefits of what you describe are small, and now
that everyone else is doing something, I don't think there is much of
a point in doing something gratuitously different without substantial
benefits.

Of course, it isn't my operating system. Go right ahead if you like.

Perry