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

[Jay Jaeger]

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