Subject: Re: /opt (NOT!)

From: Charles Ewen MacMillan <[email-masked]>

On Mon, 5 Sep 1994, David Champion wrote:

> Date: Mon, 5 Sep 1994 20:12:21 -0500 (CDT)
> From: David Champion <[email-masked]>
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: /opt (NOT!)
> 
> 
> If someone were to propose having all of NetBSD adopt /opt, that would
> be fine with me.  I'd like to point out, though, that the requirements
> of such a model should be well documented.  (My first encounter with
> /opt was in installing Solaris 2 -- my previous SVR4 experience was in
> hybrid systems.  Sun suggested making /opt a partition mountpoint,
> and said that 16M was fine.  My first installation that wanted /opt
> required that I abandon the partition and install in /usr, with a
> symlink from /opt.  Typical SMI.)

  The moment, that I am required to throw away a partition as a primary 
  mount point because someone feels like changing the name, is the day
  that I give up.

  I feel very much the same about init levels and the like. BSD is
  not an effort to make a free SVr4, BSD is its own universe, and we
  should not look for SVr4 in it, nor see it where it is not.

  It is also very important, that we do not ignore that there is already
  a large installed base of machines, and that the majority of the world
  out there is at minimum a month behind current, and usually more.

  How many messages are posted to this list, from people saying:

  "I think I installed everything that I need, vmunix.744 and a rootfs
   from....."

  That is the wide world out there, and it is exemplary of how difficult
  it is to implement even small low-level changes in the global installed
  base of a software.

  In addition to the many other points I have raised against the /opt
  or rc.* ideas, I think that this is a critical one.

> 
> Note that if "standard" but optional material installs to a
> partitioned model like Hubert's, the build source should reflect this.
> Is NetBSD as a whole ready for such a change?  This seems to me to be
> an issue for a larger body than the Amiga installation developers.
> 

 Absolutely. The importance of parallelism with the other ports cannot
 be underemphasized.

Charles Ewen MacMillan  | Tezcat.COM - Wicker Park 
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