Alexandru Mincu wrote: > Hi all, > I don't know if this has come up before so excuse me if I am repeating. > I recently stumbled upon the following Linux distribution: > http://www.gobolinux.org/ > They have an idea that Mac OS X implemented it when it first came out to > be more user friendly. > They are trying to remove the old UNIX file system scheme with the/bin > /etc /usr /var, etc directories and are trying to implement a little > more intuitive version of the file system hierarchy.
As far as I understand it the idea of Gobo is that filesystems and directories were invented to keep things organized, and the traditional way of organizing has a few drawbacks. They use the filesystem as a package manager. In this way they gain almost for free a package manager which supports: 1) easy removal of packages, simply delete its directory and update the symlinks. They have some scripts for updationg the symlinks. 2) slotting. 3) security. When installing a package, it only has write access to its own directory. I'm guessing they do this with ACLs. So we have this cool package manager which supports 1) and 2), but not 3) I think, and they have almost no package manager, but it supports 1), 2) and 3). My conclusion is that they have the simpler solution and also technical superiority. To get compatibility, but for other reasons too I think, with the traditional layout they have symlinks in the traditional places which point to the new places. An alternative might be to unionfs bind mount(sp?) package directories to /. Basically the filesystem is more like a database and we have two different views of its contents, which brings me to reiser4 :) "In the Reiser view of the future, applications like relational database managers need not exist; such tasks will be handled in the filesystem itself." (http://lwn.net/Articles/152548/). This may make those symlinks completely obsolete. Okay :) flame away Marijn Some responses to concerns raised in some of the other replies: This has nothing to do with being more like Mac OS X or Windows, or making it easier for users of these OSes to transition. Nor is it intended to make life easier solely for new users. Doing Gobo inverted would not give us 3) security. The 'readdir' kernel hack ("GoboHide") is completely optional and I think you can ask it to show symlinks now. 1) is not rendered useless by all the symlinks that need to be cleaned up, because those are handled by some simple scripts. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
