In message <199903170011.QAA07030@Cup.DSG.Stanford.EDU>, Jonathan Stone writes:
>Acutally, we have /etc/rc.conf after some long discussion and
>comparison to svr4, trying to pull out the good stuff without
>descending to runlevels and the twisty maze of runlevel symlinks.

One thing I really like about BSD/OS is 'login.conf', which has a lot of
cool features.  The SysV I used most ('Amiga Unix') had some wonderful stuff,
I think it was in /etc/default, which let you do things like set minimum
password lengths that should be accepted by system utilities (instead of
having some of them decide that it's 6, others 4, or whatever), and otherwise
making a lot of stuff that might be used by more than one program be centrally
accessible.  It was pretty cool.  I think it covered things as far out as
"default device for tar".  It's been a few years, so I don't remember.

>>(I'm personally fairly agnostic; I do prefer BSD-style Unix, but I loathe
>>some of the design decisions that are characteristic of it.)

>you say this and I think STREAMS, and sysvshm, and sysvipc message
>queues,... what do you think of the other side?

I don't actually know much about STREAMS.  The SYSV IPC stuff is admittedly
utterly unthinkable.  Ugh.  On the other hand, look at csh.  Look at specially
named files like "myname" and "mygate".

It's often hard to remember how ugly something is once you're used to it.

-s