Actually, the linux approach to configuration really bothers me. Five gorillion different files, each with it's own special snowflake syntax. Shit can even differ between distributions.
Why is the linux file structure absolute ass
John Hall
Isaac Sanchez
Almost everthing on win follows a standard, the issues are that there are a gorillion different standards for the same thing, the eccessively lax ones are popular, and there's a lot of hand rolled solutions because devs didn't know about the standard covering their specific case.
Adam Moore
Why force users to care about any of this?
Dylan Ramirez
t. luser problems
Isaac Wood
Don't like it? Make your own Linux distribution with whatever file system tree structure you want. Smarter people than you have done that and it resulted in very cool ideas being implemented: GoboLinux.org
Wyatt Ortiz
This has nothing to do with file structure.
Ryan Adams
Wrong. Minecraft installed all its files to AppData/Roaming
Matthew Ross
It's a retarded argument against a retarded OP. At least I got some (You)'s from triggered windows users. was the best.
Isaac Torres
/usr/bin was "invented" because some AT&T employees ran out of disk space in the 70s. /usr is the UNIX weenie way of writing "user" and originally held the home directories.
lists.busybox.net
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).Of course they made rules about "when the system first boots, it has to come up enough to be able to mount the second disk on /usr, so don't put things like the mount command /usr/bin or we'll have a chicken and egg problem bringing the system up." Fairly straightforward. Also fairly specific to v6 unix of 35 years ago.The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this, a 1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by bureaucrats who never question _why_ they're doing things. It stopped making any sense before Linux was ever invented, for multiple reasons:
Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation (which consumed the Free Standards Group in its' ever-growing accretion disk years ago) happily document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand why it was there in the first place. 'Ken and Dennis leaked their OS into the equivalent of home because an RK05 disk pack on the PDP-11 was too small" goes whoosh over their heads.
That's another thing wrong with everything in UNIX. Something well-designed like Multics, Common Lisp, PL/I, and Ada has good reasons for everything that's in there. The reason C and UNIX do something is usually incredibly stupid, like they ran out of disk space or they just didn't know how to do it right (and if you use UNIX, neither will you), which sucks.
en.wikipedia.org
A solution to this problem was found in the 1970s, but instead of fixing anything, the AT&T employees preferred to bureaucratize and standardize their mistake without any solution. If that /usr disk became full and they still needed more space, they would have had to pick another random directory. Maybe all this bullshit is why UNIX weenies think UNIX was the first time anyone attempted a hierarchical file system, because nobody else screwed it up this bad.
For reasons I'm ashamed to admit, I am taking an "Introto Un*x" course. (Partly to give me a reason to get back onthis list...) Last night the instructor stated "BeforeUn*x, no file system had a tree structure." I almostscreamed out "Bullshit!" but stopped myself just in time. I knew beforehand this guy definitely wasn't playingwith a full deck, but can any of the old-timers on this listplease tell me which OS was the first with a tree-structuredfile system? My guess is Multics, in the late '60s.
Andrew Flores
TFW Linux is fucked forever because some retard put their steam games on another drive.