A new Lisp-based OS that hearkens back to the old days of comprehensible computers

[Sean Caron]

Just the whole idea of so many Linux distributions makes me bang my head
against the coffee table. One thing I greatly admire about the *BSD
projects has been the strong arm of unification, all contributors are
working towards one goal... It just so happened that Linux was the "free
UNIX that took off" (just like i386 was the "architecture that won") and we
have to live with the repercussions of that in IT ops every day for better
or for worse ... But that's just my two cents and no more ... I know this
topic can get religious! :O

Best,

Sean


On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> wrote:

> On 9/30/2015 3:13 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
> > On 30 September 2015 at 17:08, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >> I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that
> modern
> >> computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire
> computer
> >> turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.)
> >
> > Indeed so.
> >
> >> I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more
> complex
> >> than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality.
> >
> > Absolutely -- and there is a *lot* of legacy stuff that we could do
> > away with now.
> >
> > Even though I'm a former Red Hat employee, I have long favoured
> > Ubuntu. Fedora's always been way too bleeding-edge for me. However, I
> > approve of one change they made recently: they've merged /bin into
> > /usr/bin and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin. I think they're merging
> > /usr/sbin and /usr/bin as well. The argument is that the root
> > filesystem is huge anyway, and there's no longer any benefit to having
> > them separated, the distinction not being clear in any case.
> >
>
> I generally agree about the distros - the issue for me wasn't so much
> that Fedora is "bleeding edge" but more that patch support only lasts
> around a year, as compared to Ubuntu LTS.
>
> As for the directories, some of what you wrote confused me a little
> (e.g. and /usr/sbin into /usr/sbin seems to be a NOP.  ;)  I suspect
> /sbin was supposed to appear in there somewhere...  ).
>
> Anyway, there was more to this than just the location of the
> directories.  The original idea of the "sbin" directories that they were
> only in root's path, and not in the path of ordinary users.  So one
> side-effect of this change will be commands that used to be less visible
> to ordinary users (and their command completion) will now be visible.
> Also, historically, /bin was that which was necessary for the system to
> boot and run - predates even the existence of the sbins.
>
> They had also better make sure that they put in links from the
> "deprecated" directories to where the stuff actually ended up, or they
> will break *tons* of shell scripts.
>
> Finally, I expect this will break a *ton* of ./configure scripts for
> software installation.
>
> Overall, I am not so sure this is such a great idea.
>
> JRJ
>