Subject: Re: Does git belong in root's $PATH?

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 19:00:23 -0800

walt wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>>/usr used to be what is now called /home.  What you're describing above
>>is the current usage.
> 
> History lessons are valuable for us youngsters ;o)  Can you give us a
> brief description of what motivated such a change?  (Just as important,
> of course, is whether the original motives have changed or disappeared.)
> 

This is the history as far as I understand it.  Keep in mind I was only 
8 years old in 1980, and I think I first learned about how Unix worked 
in 1985 or 1986, so not all of this is first-hand.

/usr was initially used for home directories (user directories.)  Both 
fore reasons as have been previously discussed (remember, most easy 
multi-user systems were a lot friendlier than one would expect today), 
and because the root disk often filled up, it became common for users to 
put binaries in /usr/bin, and often the sysadmin, too.

As the need for system security tightened, by the 80's this was a pretty 
unusable configuration.  Since home directories were specified in 
/etc/passwd, those could, and often were, located elsewhere -- much 
easier than trying to change the now-established conventions of /usr/bin 
et al.  A lot of systems in the 80's were massively multiuser anyway 
(workstations were coming in but were rare), and so you'd frequently see 
paths like /u2/h/hpa for example (my actual home directory location on 
our college server.)

The convention of using /home for home directories seems to have evolved 
out of necessity when networking came in use on a large scale (NFS, 
automounter, etc), probably in the late 80's-early 90's.  By the time 
Linux emerged in 1991 it was pretty well-established on smaller systems; 
larger systems still tended to use local conventions inherited from 
previous generation systems.

	-hpa