28 Sep
2018
28 Sep
'18
2:15 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 11:34 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
Sorry, I was (very) unclear in this point. I was referring to two separate
things:
1) Why things were spread out across multiple filesystems (space and/or
performance considerations dating from the Bell Labs days), and
2) The notion that rigid structures built in at a very low level would
naturally give rise to local naming conventions as "large" sites grew
beyond the limitations built into the system. E.g., /udd/u1 etc vs /home vs
/usr/users vs /net/somehostname vs /var/users vs whatever. As a concrete
example is the use of name-dependent hierarchical home directory paths like
"/home/c/r/cross" because one tried to put too many directories into /home
(I have actually seen the UFS directory entry limit hit in /home on a
machine that had >32k users). Anyway, eventually through whatever accident
of history "/home" seems to have won as a de facto standard.
From: Dan
Cross
particular in sites with lots of users like
universities and
production-focused corporate groups
The existence of /usr, /usr/bin, /etc, /lib, etc dates back to the Research
group at Bell, so I don't think we can look to these other environments
for an
explanation.
"Hmm. Well, we've got space in /usr: create
/usr/bin
I seem to recall reading (don't recall where, OTTOMY) an explanation for
the
creation of /usr/bin, and I think it was performance related; IIRC the
issue
was that they wanted to keep the directory size down (both for disk block
caching, and search time, reasons). Or maybe that was later on, and it was
originally created for 'user-maintained' ancillary programs (another vague
memory)?
I think the latter might be a justification-after-the-fact: /usr as the
filesystem containing stuff of interest to the users.
The more intriguing possibility from the antiquarian
point of view is
If I recall correctly, the mappings from "users" on TOPS-20 to directories
is an injection, but I don't think they used the "home directory"
nomenclature.
Certainly the analogy with one's directory as home is clear enough.
- Dan C.
whether someone coined "/home" and then
THAT led to the rise of the
"home
directory" nomenclature.
My memory is that the term "home directory" predates /home - perhaps on
other
OS's such as TOPS-20, but I don't have time to research that. (I did look
quickly in the Multics docs, and it has 'working directory', i.e. current
dir
- but it refers to the home dir as 'original WD', i.e. the WD at the time
of
login.)