Stupid man pages

[Scott Barman]

In article <ANSELMO-ED.90Jun9095657 at bigbird.cs.yale.edu> Anselmo-Ed at cs.yale.edu (Ed Anselmo) writes:
>>>>>> On 8 Jun 90 16:26:56 GMT, scott at nbc1.ge.com (Scott Barman) said:
>
>Scott> In addition to error message, Sun continues to move things around to
>Scott> the point they it is getting real annoying.  Like /usr/spool being a
>Scott> symlink to /var/spool?  Why not just keep /usr/spool as it has always
>Scott> been?  Another one would be to load SunOS 4.* and cd to /usr/lib/uucp
>Scott> and not find everything there because THEY decided the configuration
>Scott> stuff belongs in /etc/uucp after it has live in /usr/lib/uucp for all
>Scott> these
>
>I like having a /usr partition that doesn't grow.  One less partition
>to backup.

I never ran into this problem... I always tried to make sure "growing"
file systems were mounted.  /usr/spool would be mounted from elsewhere,
for example.

>If you've ever tried sharing /usr/lib/uucp (with config files in
>/usr/lib/uucp) across nfs partitions, you end up doing symlink tricks
>anyway, so it's just as well that Sun moved the config files to
>/etc/uucp.

I don't know about you, but we have one machine, one exit point to the
outside world.  All our sendmail.cf files are set up to pass mail
to the uucp server.  What is in that directory is of no consequence
to the clients since they never execute uucp/uux.  I like having one
machine to do uucp, it keeps life managable!

>Most of the old paths still work (/usr/man, /usr/spool, /usr/adm), so
>most users don't notice the change.

Let's try this senario: the tape(s) are delivered and you go over the
installation procedure in the manual and as part of the release notes
you are told the new system has HoneyDanBer UUCP.  You think that's
great because it was the only thing you like when you had to live on
a System V box.  You install your operating system and you go to setup
uucp.  Having previous knowledge of HDB you immediatly cd to /usr/lib/uucp
and wonder where's the Permissions, Systems, Dialers, etc. files?  I
had to waste my time (I am not a full-time administrator) and RTFM to
not only find out that the files are under /etc/uucp, but even with
the symlink in /usr/spool, I have to specify /var/spool/uucp* in the
permissions file or nothing will work right!

You're right, users do not notice the change.  But I am not a full time
systems administrator and I have better things to do (including meeting
deadlines) than to hunt down things that have been in a "standard"
place since I learned Unix under v7.  I still would like to know the
motivation!

-- 
scott barman				NBC Systems Development
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