4 ms·

Is that also where /usr/share got its name for application data? Data that's shared among the rest of the users, as opposed to in their respective homedirs?

cellularmitosis 4y ago
share is for architecture-independent data (ie data which is “shared” by all architectures). Executable binaries are not shared, but things like man pages are.
- bodyfour 4y ago
  I believe it dates back to the heyday of diskless workstations. It was commonplace to have dozens of workstation machines getting their OS files over NFS from a central server. Thus why the (per-machine, read-write) /var became standardized. Earlier /usr contained a mix of writable things (like /usr/log). Now it was important to make /usr something that could be NFS mounted read-only by a bunch of NFS clients. There were also UNIXes that ran on multiple architectures, like SunOS on 68k and SPARC. In theory, you could have them both use the same read-only /usr/share mount and save some resources on the server. I say "in theory" because I don't know how many sites ever implemented this in practice. There were definitely places that supported mixed-architecture diskless fleets, but I'm unsure how many of them were committed to keeping the OS version pinned between them... or how many then went through the extra work to make /usr/share a separate mountpoint. I'm sure some people did it, but it's not something I remember seeing personally. Still, I feel it's somewhat useful to help humans understand what parts of a package are CPU-specific and which aren't. Probably good that it's lived on.
slim 4y ago
I think /usr/share is linux specific. so much later
- valleyer 4y ago
  It exists on BSDs as well. (No idea who did it first.)
  - bodyfour 4y ago
    I think the first place I saw it was on SunOS 4, but not sure if that was the first. Definitely existed pre-Linux
    - usr1106 4y ago
      Around 1990 I used Unix clusters. Not only 68000 Sun mixed with SPARC, but also the other Unix workstation vendors. There was a lot of NFS and also completely diskless machines. /usr/share always meant it's architecture-independent and can be used by machines of any architecture.

cellularmitosis 4y ago

share is for architecture-independent data (ie data which is “shared” by all architectures). Executable binaries are not shared, but things like man pages are.

bodyfour 4y ago
I believe it dates back to the heyday of diskless workstations. It was commonplace to have dozens of workstation machines getting their OS files over NFS from a central server. Thus why the (per-machine, read-write) /var became standardized. Earlier /usr contained a mix of writable things (like /usr/log). Now it was important to make /usr something that could be NFS mounted read-only by a bunch of NFS clients. There were also UNIXes that ran on multiple architectures, like SunOS on 68k and SPARC. In theory, you could have them both use the same read-only /usr/share mount and save some resources on the server. I say "in theory" because I don't know how many sites ever implemented this in practice. There were definitely places that supported mixed-architecture diskless fleets, but I'm unsure how many of them were committed to keeping the OS version pinned between them... or how many then went through the extra work to make /usr/share a separate mountpoint. I'm sure some people did it, but it's not something I remember seeing personally. Still, I feel it's somewhat useful to help humans understand what parts of a package are CPU-specific and which aren't. Probably good that it's lived on.

slim 4y ago

I think /usr/share is linux specific. so much later

valleyer 4y ago
It exists on BSDs as well. (No idea who did it first.)
- bodyfour 4y ago
  I think the first place I saw it was on SunOS 4, but not sure if that was the first. Definitely existed pre-Linux
  - usr1106 4y ago
    Around 1990 I used Unix clusters. Not only 68000 Sun mixed with SPARC, but also the other Unix workstation vendors. There was a lot of NFS and also completely diskless machines. /usr/share always meant it's architecture-independent and can be used by machines of any architecture.