Journal ACK!!'s Journal: Ranting about revisionists and Filesystems
I hear people online complaining about the complexity of the unix filesystem. This irritates me to no earthly end.
The hierachal filesystem of unix and its inherent directory structure is actually quite logical. If you drill down to many of their arguements you find out quickly that they have made the jump in logic that their brand of linux or commercial *Nix is Unix and it is not.
The theory of the unix filesystem and how it is organized is simple and elegant and thoroughly ignored by most linux distro makers and commercial Unix folks.
Top Level:
/ = shit needed to boot.
This simple paradigm is so completely ignored or crapped on by most *Nixes that it boggles the mind.
Lower level file structure on the other hand is usually maintained despite this.
"prefix"/bin = binaries as in the program files you run.
"prefix"/lib = libraries needed for the binaries.
"prefix"/man = manual pages for the binaries.
"prefix"/shared = duh, shared files used by the programs.
Now, it drives me frickin' nuts for example that commercial games would install themselves by default to
I will not even begin to go into the variety of ways that Solaris breaks the paradigm on one hand and many others does things the right way. Despite many
It may seem cleaner or more logical for Suse for example to go throwing gnome and kde into their own
For all the multitude of headaches with having a half million binaries living in the same
Some people talk about going to a Apple style Apps dir kind of method. I don't like breaking the Unix style of doing things without a damn good reason. If packagers want their apps to have their own dirs then the X way or Solaris method of handling Apache could easily be used. What do I mean?
1. Only someone with root should be installing packages on your box even if its supposed to live just in their home dir. Its an invtitation for things to get broken or confusing for the users in a quick way.
2. If you want your app to live in its own self-contained world then let the app live in its own little
Ranting about revisionists and Filesystems More Login
Ranting about revisionists and Filesystems
Slashdot Top Deals