Re: Hurd FS hierarchy (was Re: LD_LIBRARY_PATH troubles)

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome@real-time.com> writes:

>       what's the logic behind the /com name?

We needed a place for mutable data that could be shared between
machines.  The existing de facto standard was 4.4 BSD practice and
SunOS, neither of which had a place for this: they simply treated all
such data as unsharable.  But the MIT AI lab *did* arrange to have it
shared.  The most common examples at the time were user mailboxes.
The AI lab put it in a directory called "com", which stood for
"common".  So, given that there was *no* standard place for such data,
and we were writing a standard, we decided to just adopt the AI lab's
name for GNU.

Thomas