Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 13:35:49 -0800 From: "Jim Howard" <jiho@sierra.net> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@Glue.umd.edu>, freebsd-questions@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: gnumalloc Message-ID: <199508162205.AA01418@diamond.sierra.net>
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> I don't think you have the whole story, and I believe you might possibly > be wrong about this administrator versus user mindset. One of the big > reasons why you want stuff in the root partition to be statically linked > is so that, in the situation where you've blown away something drastic in > /usr, and can't mount it (and all of your shared libs), the tools that > exist to allow you to (possibly) fix this still work. If everything is > made dynamically linked, and you lose your libs, you're dead. If fact, I > don't think you can even update your libs easily, because when you move > them, every tool you have will die. But your rebuttal just provides another example of the point. In the single-user desktop PC world, if things get THAT fouled up you just re-install the whole system from scratch, with important files presumably backed up securely. Your argument would be considered somewhere pretty far out on the fringe, frankly. But even accepting it, why would anyone consider putting /usr on a separately-mounted partition on any machine except a server? What purpose is served [ ;) ] for a single-user desktop machine? And how did this degenerate into an argument, anyway? Your perspective is clearly different from mine. It still amazes me that, although most UNI* machines are single-user workstations, it doesn't occur to people to reconsider the notion that workstations should carry all the baggage that only multi-user servers actually require. This one-size-fits-all approach has limited the appeal of UNI*. (The hardware margins of workstation vendors, however, have attracted a fair amount of envy in the PC clone market, where everyone is counting on Windows 95 to prop things up.) And since this all started with the memory usage of X and its clients: How many sites do you know of, where the network transparency of X is actually utilized as originally designed? What happened to the X terminal market? I thought the newsgroups had been abandoned to arguments like this....
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