On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Nate Carlson wrote:

> Also, what's the point of c:, d:, e:, f:, etc? It makes so much more sense
> to have stuff mounted in one large namespace instead of splitting it up
> like that.

Not necessarily.  For doing logical volumes, it's nice to have a handle on
the physical location.  That's the way VMS (sorry to mention it 3 times in
one day) handles things, but you can create a logical name and say that
your directory, [foo.dir] is found on c:, d:, g:, and h:.  Called bound
volumes, and I think it's the wheel that the LVM project(s) are
reinventing.

One nice side effect is that there's no such thing as a partition, and if
a disk gets full, you simply add another one to the system and tell it
which directory has more space now. :)

> I'll take the UNIX-style file naming system any day.. it's logical. 

No pun intended?  But that's just it -- it is *only* logical.  What's nice
is to have physical/logical control at run-time, and then be able to make
pretty symlinks so the user calls it /mydir.

> Maybe a bit of a learning curve, but at least things generally follow
> some order, and you can tell why things go where they do.

Until they don't. :)  Actually, though, that's not really a characteristic
of the system but a reflection on how tidy the admins are.  Like the
desk/file cabinet balance between two different offices.  Any file system
is OK -- as long as you *USE* it!

-- 
"To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." --Anonymous