[6711] in Athena Bugs
delete et al in /bin/athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Dec 26 17:54:07 1990
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 90 17:53:49 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: bjaspan@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, henry@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Barry Jaspan writes (about the "delete" software suite):
>I think it should be in /usr/athena/bin. However, since Athena still
>has the losing design of putting binaries in /usr/athena :-), I think
>it should go there.
>
>I don't see the need for this system to take up space on the root
>partition. If someone is mucking around with a deactivated
>workstation (for example, in single-user mode) they should be careful
>and knowledgeable enough not to need them around. In any case, I
>don't think it makes sense to have them on the root of public machines
>which are hardly ever used while deactivated anyway.
Henry Mensch further writes:
>this is really a bug report (that the delete suite is installed on the
>root, that is). hopefully this sort of stupidity can be prevented in
>the next release; it's not reasonable for release engineering to
>whinge about how much space they don't have on the root while letting
>this sort of stuff slip thru ...
I have several comments:
First of all, I had no part in the decision about where to put
delete when it was first installed, so I am speaking from the point of
view of a third-party observer :-). Frankly, I don't care much where
it goes.
All of the delete programs are installed as symbolic links on the
workstation root, which means that they take up exactly five blocks on
the root. This may or may not be a major concern, but I don't think
it's enough of a concern to talk about "this sort of stupidity" and
"this sort of stuff slip[ping] thru."
About /bin/athena vs. /usr/athena: It seems to me (although I don't
know this for sure) that /bin/athena was chosen to correspond to the
location of rm, in /bin. If delete is supposed to be useable as a
replacement for rm, then it should be installed in a manner similar to
rm's installation.
Finally, whether or not people using deactivated workstations
"should be careful and knowledgeable enough not to need them around"
is a religious issue that would be better discussed in athena-ws -- if
you want to talk about it more, feel free to talk about it there. I
know of at least one experienced system administrator who has "alias
rm rm -i" in his /.cshrc to prevent accidental removal of files. It
seems to me that someone working as root has even more reason to be
careful about what files he removes than someone running as himself.
Jonathan Kamens
Project Athena Quality Assurance
