Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 09:03:37 +0200 (MET DST) From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: proff@suburbia.net, nate@mt.sri.com, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, terry@lambert.org, sef@kithrup.com, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: on the subject of changes to -RELEASEs... Message-ID: <199704100703.JAA15863@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> In-Reply-To: <20842.860656023@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Apr 10, 97 00:06:44 am
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> The problem is that the minute you start removing things from /etc and > putting them in their more "logical" places, the learning curve for > existing UNIX admins goes up and this too is "cost." on the other hand, this shuffling of locations has already happened with /etc/sysconfig and, for 2.2, with /usr/local/etc/rc.d So, once you accept the principle that many things may not be in their historical place, one more will make no difference. The one thing really to avoid is to have two copies of the same thing, one of which is a fake (like it was at times on AIX). > However, if you were to say that everything in /etc should depend on a > single writable configuration file, I wouldn't argue with the > principle (and it's what I had in mind for /etc/sysconfig) but simply > point to the fact that "everyone" knows about files like > /etc/resolv.conf too, and if you put "domain=blah.com" and > "resolver1=foo .. resolvern=bar" lines into /etc/sysconfig and > made resolv.conf redundant (or removed it) there would be a lot of > confusion. how about making these "well known" files such as /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/host.conf and other stuff symlinks into /var/etc ? This is what I have done for a long time to support diskless machines with shared readonly root. Even Ultrix (from 4.0 onwards, circa 1990) has used this kind of solution, yet the sysadm would just look into /etc to find the right things. And if there are too many links, one might just make the entire /etc a symlink into /var/etc. The whole directory, on a freshly installed 2.2 is less than 500KB, and those things which are likely to grow are databases which should be writable anyways. I know that there is a chicken and egg problem -- you don't have /var available until you have mounted it and this is done in /etc/rc after reading /etc/fstab... but that might be fixed in the kernel somehow while preserving the right semantics of /etc/fstab and friends. I am more than willing to come out with some suggestions on this topic, but only if this has a chance to get integrated in the system (otherwise, I already have a working solution for my own needs and it is not worth changing it for no purpose). Luigi -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ _____________________________|______________________________________
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