Comment by gerdesj

Comment by gerdesj 3 days ago

Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want.

Why get upset over /media vs /mnt? You do you, I know I do.

For example The Step CA docs encourage using /etc/step-ca/ (https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-ser...) for configuration for their product. Normally I would agree but as I am manually installing this thing myself and not following any of the usual docs, I've gone for /srv/step-ca.

I think we get enough direction from the ... "standards" ... for Unix file system layouts that any reasonably incompetent admin can find out which one is being mildly abused today and get a job done. On Windows ... good luck. I've been a sysadmin for both platforms for roughly 30 years and Windows is even odder than Unix.

Wowfunhappy 3 days ago

> Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want.

Why is the root of one of my drives `/` while the roots of my other drives are subdirectories of that first drive?

Reply View 5 replies

eichin 3 days ago

Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)

Reply View | 1 reply
- Wowfunhappy 3 days ago
  
  I do get it, I just don't think that the UNIX way is necessarily more natural than the Windows way.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
Dylan16807 3 days ago

In multiple ways, / doesn't have to be one of your drives.

Reply View | 0 replies
Hendrikto 2 days ago

Because you (or your distro) configured it like that. You don’t have to do it that way.

Reply View | 0 replies
TimeBearingDown 3 days ago

Only the root of the root filesystem is /
The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root.
The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path.
* clarity

Reply View | 0 replies