I must say that I agree with Ciaran on this particular point. The current standards that tell you where to put things is lucicrous. A file system is NO different than a piece of code. The whole thing should be manageable by standardized VARIABLES not hard coded standards. Could you imagine how horrible the kernel would be if you could only use a function in a certain way simply because you couldnt use variables in it? rand(1,10) as opposed to rand(something,something). That just wouldnt make any sense now would it? The same principle can be applied to FS structures.
Apache is one such project that doesnt care where you put it's files. You just define the variables as to where everything goes at compile time, and there you have it. That's probably the correct way to go about defining where system/data files go. There is no current Linux FS standard that does this yet but having Gentoo be the first would be something interesting. The only problem is that there ARE some applications that would/may not work with a FS like this. They would need to be modified at compile time in order to work. These are usually binary only installs such as VMWare. They would work, but they would break the FS standard because their system files would not be in a standardized location. This may be fine for some, but others that want a very clean FS would not be satisfied with this. Thus you would have to get companies such as VMWare onboard with the FS standard which isnt likely to happen. If you want some sort of FS standard, I dont think Gentoo will be the distro for you for quite some time to come unless something dramatic changes and in a hurry. There seems to be an unwritten guideline as to where things *should* be, but not everything follows that unwritten rule. Ciaran McCreesh wrote: >On Wed, 04 May 2005 11:46:28 -0500 Lance Albertson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >wrote: >| Actually, he does have a point. I know a lot of folks gripe that linux >| doesn't have any standard FS layout of where files are etc. If >| something like this could be implemented, it would make those people a >| lot happier. > >Well, there's FHS, which we don't follow because it is severely broken >in various places. Or we could create our own "Standardised Linux >Platform" specification and try to persuade the other distributions to >sign up for it. Of course, we'd mandate portage as the package manager. > >Thing is, it really isn't a problem. Data files go in $(datadir), >configuration files go in $(sysconfdir) and so on, and the build system >handles the rest. It doesn't matter what $(datadir) is actually defined >to be (unless your code really really sucks). > > > -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
