[Info-vax] Orphaned processes on OpenVMS

[Bob Koehler]

In article <5442791a-1a87-473c-ba87-951f872ced9e at d19g2000prh.googlegroups.com>, Wendell <wendellxe at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> What were the perceived advantages of the per-disk hierarchy? The Unix
> way seems obviously cleaner to me, but it seems that Darwin/OS X has
> gone over to something more like VMS.

   MS-DOS and sons also use a per-disk hierarchy.  OS X just mounts
   extra disks by dynamically managing UNIX style mount points in 
   /Volumes.

   I think not needing to implement mount points just makes the OS
   simpler to write and the system manager's job easier.  We used to 
   move around removable disk platters a lot, and never had to worry 
   about what directory to mount them in.

   I don't see anything "cleaner" either way, unless someone gets in the
   habbit of hiding files by storing them in the mount points. 
   Definitely unclean, but you probably need to be root to pull it off,
   and I certainly never did that when I was admin on some UNIX systems.

   On most UNIX systems, I see the first four partitions as root, swap,
   var, and user.  (Darwin seems to start down this path, too).  When 
   there's more than one "user" disk I see mount point naming conventions 
   as random as the length of the admins' beards.  What I don't see is a
   true hierarchy where volume 2 is monuted on volume 1 and volume 3 is
   mounted on volume 2.  Admins seem to have anough sense to not make
   use of the ability to make volume 3's location depend on whether
   volume 2 is working.