[ILUG] file management

[David Golden]

On Wednesday 21 November 2001 18:43, Paul Jakma wrote:
> grumble... been a pet peeve of mine for a long while..
>
> http://www.mosfet.org/fss.html
>
> /(usr|opt)/{gnome,kde,mozilla,...} and appropriate file
> in /etc/profile.d/
>
> grumble...
>
> --paulj


I kinda dislike the Linux filesystem system too.   It's certainly
better than windows, since windows manages to combine the _worst_ aspects of 
both approaches, since 'doze separates the applications, then the 
applications install stuff in other places too... I don't think _every_ app 
should have its own directory, but it's a lot easier if the major packages 
like X11, KDE and GNOME do.   as Mosfet points out, rpm/deb and such a system 
are not mutually exclusive, and the Unix systems of yore did in fact separate 
the most major lumps of code.

However, I think the problem is really with the underlying filesystem -
it's not as database-like as it could be.   I like _both_ systems - the 
problem is that they don't coexist in the current simple filesystem hierarchy,
unless you use semi-automated symlink maintenance tools like stow and encap.
[I think I've actually ranted about this before on this list, but hey...] 

What's really needed, IMHO, is a richer filesystem like Hurd or Plan 9, 
allowing translucent/union effects over directories, so the filesystem itself 
takes care of such things.   That won't be in linux most likely until Reiser4 
is finished, but the basic framework is creeping into linux with the VFS.

A few other things would be nice, I think -  some of you may remember AmigaOS 
 had a generalised user-defined "PATH" concept,  "assigns" that were 
essentially part of the filesystem, you could cd into them etc., but they 
could act like "PATH" variables, with the "assign FOO: add" commands.

Or how about richer filesystem query semantics, like XPath/XPointer in XML, 
say, allowing symlinks/readdir() to "the union of every bin subdirectory of 
every subdirectory of opt". 

I'm not up to coding such things (maybe unless it was my fulltime job - even 
then, I probably wouldn't have enough experience to do it in a timely 
fashion), but there are at least some people pushing in that direction ayway.