[66] in DCNS Development
Filesystem Reorganization for release 7.3
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Rosenstein)
Thu Jul 11 15:10:21 1991
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 91 15:07:56 -0400
From: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
To: developers@MIT.EDU, release-73@MIT.EDU, acmg@MIT.EDU,
We held the design review this morning, and made some changes to the
proposal. The revised document is available as
/mit/mar/txt/filsys.{mss,doc,PS}. The changes are:
1. We're concerned about making too many changes when we've promised
people that this release contains no major changes. So the DECstation
will have compatibility symlinks as well for both users and
developers. The RIOS will get user (i.e. location of binaries)
symlinks, but not symlinks for developers (since porting BSD programs
to this SysV based platform is already a major change). This should
avoid most complaints from users and developers.
However, we will announce with this release that the compatibility
symlinks are going away in a year, and provide a documents telling
users how to fix dotfiles and developers how to build programs.
2. We will not make the distinction between third-party and local
software. This distinction is somewhat arbitrary, any paths chosen
based on this are either too long or unclear in meaning, will require
developers to add additional -I and -L flags, and it will not really
put that many files in one directory anyway. All binaries will go in
/usr/athena/bin, all libraries in /usr/athena/lib, all include files
in /usr/athena/include. This goes for X as well: binaries in
/usr/athena/bin, libraries in /usr/athena/lib, include files in
/usr/athena/include/X11, runtime libraries (i.e. app-defaults and
fonts) in /usr/athena/lib/X11. The basic scheme here is to take the
preferred path, and insert "/athena" after "/usr".
3. In the cases where we replace a vendor binary by putting something
with the same name in /usr/athena/bin so that they get it instead of
the one in /bin, we will also put in a symlink from [program].aix to
the vendor version (or *.ucb, *.aux, *.ult, etc). In this way, users
can chose to use the vendor version if they wish, while not changing
their path to prefer the vendor version for all programs.
4. We will move the two programs in *etc* directories that users ever
invoke (zwgc and zinit) to /usr/athena/bin, leaving compatibility
symlinks. Then on platforms where system binaries go in /sbin instead
of /etc, we can follow the lead of the vendor.
5. We will not try to do anything with /usr/sipb for now.
6. We have to educate users about MANPATH, and put some support for
this in the standard dotfiles.
Because any changes to this policy push back the building of the
release, we are unlikely to accept any further changes to the
proposal.
-Mark
