At 5:37 AM -0600 11/23/2000, Gabriel Paubert wrote:
[...]

I agree that power management status/log should go to /var. On the other
hand /etc has to be on the root fs for several reasons (/etc/inittab among
others is quite important): IOW you don't use a separate mount point for
/etc unless you want to play dirty tricks with init.

Of cuorse there is a precedent for modifying /etc: /etc/mtab, but
admittedly for good reasons. mount also puts lock files in /etc and has to
have these funky option (-n and -f) to work around the chicken and egg
problem of initial read only root filesystem mount by the kernel. Once you
have these option I don't see any reason not to have /var/mtab instead for
example but maybe I miss something.

Now /etc/mtab is also somewhat redundant with /proc/mounts. Actually you
should be able to link /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts but it raises a lot of
problems and does not work satifactorily in my experience.

[...]

I think technically the /proc filesystem is optional. Requiring /proc for
mount to function gives you another fun chicken + egg of how the heck do
you then mount /proc on startup? ;)

At the risk of drifting way off topic, it might be worth looking at
rewriting mount and fellow /etc/mtab users to just never need to use a file
like /etc/mtab. I can particularily recall a few times where a stale,
unwritable /etc/mtab made some system reconfiguration and/or system
recovery about 5 times more annoying than it needed to be.

30 years of unix tradition be damned, /etc/mtab sucks.


As for pmud, why not use a socket interface for everything? Using loopback
tcp  in one place and a file in another place seems a bit silly to me.


Cheers - Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler :)


--
Tony "Nicoya" Mantler - Renaissance Nerd Extraordinaire - nicoya@apia.dhs.org
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada           --           http://nicoya.feline.pp.se/


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