On 2021-03-10 at 08:09, Cmdte Alpha Tigre Z wrote: > It's what I'm trying to say, it looks like something, because someday > ago it was, but it is something else. > > With whole respect to UNIX, do we really need backward compatibility > with it, or something alike?
Absolutely need? No. Does it make sense to retain it, in the absence of reason to use another naming standard? Yes. Given the need to be compatible with software that already exists out there, trying to change this is likely to involve breaking enough things that it's just not remotely worth the effort. > I saw another directory called "etc" that sounds like "etcetera" but > appears to be "configurations". What does "etc" mean? Again, I'm > not trying to be destructively critical, just asking. It does stand for "et cetera", yes. It's not inherently exclusively configuration files, that's just the primary thing that gets kept there by standardized convention. To understand the reason for the name, you'd again have to look back into the history of UNIX. As above, there's no inherent reason this naming convention *couldn't* be changed, but doing so would be a vast and invasive thing, which would probably break at least a few things that one might not notice. Doing it at all would basically require you to design the entire distribution around the new naming model - and so far, AFAIK, nobody with the resources to put together a distro has found doing this to be worth the bother. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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