[sf-lug] the latest on the servepath colo story

[Rick Moen]

Quoting jim stockford (jim at well.com):

> This hierarchy is intended to be shareable among all architecture 
> platforms of a given OS; thus, for example, a site with i386, Alpha, 
> and PPC platforms might maintain a single /usr/share directory that is 
> centrally-mounted.

Sure.  Why have redundantly stored /usr/share/man (manpages) on all the
machines in a server farm, if you can just NFS-mount it?

> the directories scattered about with the name "lib" have to do with
> binary libraries, but the "lib" director(y, ies) under /var, as an
> example, store tracking or variable data pertaining to the binary
> libraries that themselves are stored in /lib or in /usr/lib (or
> /usr/local/lib or...); 

If this seems a little haphazard, it helps to understand that the FHS
(Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) is an ongoing attempt to coax various 
Unixes into converging on a somewhat more rational file-tree structure, 
after three decades of chaos, e.g., having binaries in /etc.  (GNU/Linux 
systems themselves are the fruit, in part, of a committee effort with
some of the same aims, called POSIX.)  Many of the places where FHS
seems vague or weasel-worded are written that way in order to persuade 
some of those *ix user communities without offending them.  E.g., you
can't just tell them "stop creating a separate X11 sub-hierarchy in
/usr/X11R6; that's dumb."  Instead, you use words like "optional" and
"deprecated".

> the games directories scattered about relate to games, but those under
> /usr/share/ are different from those under /var/ or those elsewhere,
> the upper?level directories indicate the nature of the files, the
> lower- level directories the purpose. 

Sounds right.