Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!bzs%bu-cs.bu.edu@bu-it.BU.EDU
From: bzs%bu-cs.bu.edu@bu-it.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Jerry Pournelle on UNIX (From BY
Message-ID: <11196@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 9 Jan 88 22:01:28 GMT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 19


From: Andy Glew <aglew%fang@gswd-vms.gould.com>
>Barry Shein (paraphrased) says that he cannot see the advantage of
>having / be symlinks to stuff on ROMdisk -- because, since / is still
>writable, the advantage of not being able to trash a ROMdisk / is
>lost. (Please correct me if I've misunderstood).

Hmm, perhaps I misunderstood, then you misunderstood what I misunderstood...

I thought the idea was that the ROM file system would have symlinks to
the writable disk files so they could be changed, like editing an rc
file or replacing with a newer /bin/sh (ie. the data was on disk, the
symlinks in ROM.)

I suppose at worst we've revealed yet another two cases to be
considered though the original issue, what does it really buy you,
remains at question.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University