> > My bet is: consensus on this one will be tricky ;-)
> 
> Yeah, I think so too.
> 
> If only root partition is available, the machine doesn't reach
> multiuser mode yet, thus, it's likely the script is invoked with
> root privilege.
> And to see whether the machine is running NetBSD as its OS,
> you can use the following command:
> 	/sbin/sysctl -n kern.ostype

well, the problem is: if you have many different machines
running different OS's, and you have a serious problem you
need to fix quickly, and you only have a root partition,
generic "set up a decent working environment" scripts
fail because they can't generically determine the type
of machine you are on, and they can't determine who you
are (eg, you can't find out that you are root on a broken
machine as opposed to a regular user on a working machine).

placing id/logname/uname in /usr enforces slow, manual,
and tedious progress in setting up a working environment,
and forces one to remember OS specific things like
"/sbin/sysctl -n kern.ostype" (and consider that
you don't even have docs available in such a
situation when you can't mount partitions).