On 08/14/2012 04:55 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Brian K. White said the following on 08/14/2012 03:49 AM:
sco open server put home directories in /usr up until 5.0.5 or 5.0.6 but that was always a terrible terrible mess. I never tried to create a user named "lib" on a sco box but I wouldn't be surprised if the system allowed it and made exactly the mess you are now imagining. I think there was a system user named "bin" that was not login enabled and had no home directory defined so that one skates by on technicalities. ;)
And there are many other entries in /etc/passwd ... Go look.
Early on it wasn't such a problem, as user access and activity was restricted and *nix was seen as more of a lab curiousity than a production system. That started changing in the 1980's and accelerated when Linux 0.99 was released.
Years ago there was a paper at a USENIX or some conference titled "Life without root". It showed how many subsystems could be administered without the need for root. The paper used UUCP and mail as an example. At the time this was dramatic but now its the way we do it. We see it subtly today in other ways, there are files and devices owned by, for example, lp.
It works great when implemented intelligently. Otherwise it was a disaster.
How much like Big Iron and the way Big Iron gets administered do you want to be?
Traditionally Big Iron had few processes that were closely monitored and tuned because process creation and inter process communications in the traditional model; heck even the DEC VAX-VMS that grew up after UNIX and had Bill Joy battling with Dave Cutler over performance issues between VMS and VAX-UNIX had lots of static processes because process creation was expensive. Part of what was revolutionary about UNIX was that process creation was cheap-cheap-cheap, and so the shell could create short lived, transient programs that did something simple (and hence weren't complex and hence could be easily debugged and proved correct) and combined with pipes by the shell. This was revolutionary. But there was no way that such ephemeral, evanescent entities could be tuned the way mainframe programs were, no way that principles of resource management and optimization and all those other techniques could - or needed - to be applies.
Tangential trivia: Unix and the ephemeral nature of Unix processes turned out to be ideal (with some tweaking) for managing telephone switches and their transient connections.
But, it seems, we're giving up on that. Many of our models are getting to be more like the traditional mainframe as versions of UNIX/Linux move in to take over work that was once done by mainframes.
I would have said more like Windows and it's monolithic do-everything-under-the-sun style of coding and constant reinventing of the wheel rather than using what is already there and piping between tools. Like, why reinvent sed in python? Just build a script and call sed. Simple, right? There are many existing tools that are not being used because... Why??? Baffling. And what's starting to happen: The tools are disappearing, deprecated because people prefer to reinvent the wheel, do things the hard way, so no one uses them and when you need them, *they're not there anymore!* I intended to recycle my old Yggdrasil and Slackware distro CD's but I think I'd better keep them if just for the tools they have that are beginning to disappear from current Linux distros. Been so long since I've even /seen/ a running mainframe or mini I had forgotten about the mainframe styles. IIRC reinventing the wheel in mainframes was the norm, perhaps even the gold standard, even outside of the classroom. DOS and Windows programmers started out in that environment so it's no wonder Windows has been such a load of mess. Unfortunately, that mentality is displacing KISS and it's flexibility.
So perhaps we will see delegated authority making use of non root IDs to do what used to be done by root. "Life without root".
Sounds like Android. And that's fine but root isn't going away. I hope. Still need someone with godly powers to sort out messes created by the lesser-privileged. Windows: "Work harder, not smarter!" *nix/Linux: "Work smarter, not harder!" (aka "G***amn lazy programmers!") jd -- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org