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If I Had My Own Distro...
Gentu writes "Adam Scheinberg writes an interesting editorial explaining what he would do if he was a developer and he had a Linux distribution. His suggestions are pretty radical, and in places resembles of what Apple had done to MacOSX with the help of BSD as the underlying technology. But if this is what it takes to get Linux into the next level, it might worth the consideration."
The goal of the MHS project is to define a Modern Hierarchy Standard for UNIX-like operating systems which will further enable them to evolve, innovate, grow, and compete with Windows and other modern OSes.
/bin => /System/Commands /sbin => /System/Commands /boot => /System/Boot /dev => /System/Devices /etc => /System/Config /lib => /System/Libraries /proc => /System/Process /mnt => /Mount /opt => /Apps /tmp => /Temp /home => /Users /usr/bin => /System/Executables /usr => mostly placed under /System /var => mostly placed under /System
/Apps directory rather than cramming everything into /usr.
Specifically, MHS technology will provide the following benefits:
100% Application Directory Oriented
Internationalization of Directory Names
More Intuitive Directory Names
Fewer Root Directories
Support for Case-Insensitive File Systems
Full Coexistence with Legacy FHS
Increased System Flexibility
A new hierarchy will be a big enough change to make distributions switch to application directories.
Set of environmental variables pointing the location of major system directories.
Applications would no longer need to hard code directory names.
System level directories grouped together under a common directory. (/System)
Currently, the directories are expected to be moved to the following locations:
All paths will be lower-case on a case-sensitive file system. As shown otherwise.
Application developers and distribution makers will need to use the
The autoconf family of tools will be patched to support the new hierarchy which will make most applications translate easily.
Although it can still be done, MHS will not support the same level of shareability (i.e. mounted over a network) as the legacy FHS standard.
FHS can be emulated via symlinks and MHS can be emulated on existing FHS systems. A kernel/file system hack of some kind may be done to have the legacy directories disappear in directory scans, to help improve user friendliness.
In addition to the standard, the project is developing a set of scripts that will setup the new hierarchy on existing FHS compatible systems.
The standard will not be finalized until a Linux distribution ships based upon it.
Ok, so this guy has an article about how confusing it is that there's a zllion GNU/Linux distros, and he wants to add one more -- his own? His own distro which does everything backwards from other distros, so that users can't use any of the help-documents that apply to all GNU/Linux distros?
/boot -- the portion you boot from. /dev -- where devices (like your CDROM) are. /mnt -- where devices are mounted and accessible from. /root and /usr -- where most of the applicaitons are. Then there's /home -- where the user's stuff is. How exactly doesn't this make sense? My suggested improvements would be renaming /dev to /devices, /usr to /user, and /mnt to /mounted-devices.
His complaints abou the file-system hierarchy are noted. However, I believe he is wrong. There is
I think this guy's comments are certainly not taylored towards making a good GNU/Linux distributiion overall -- but only one that is good for people with 1+GHz systems. Only allowing people to choose what are clearly the most bloated applications? I don't think so. Obviously, this guy doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone who wants to use Linux for older computers.
Rather than eliminating choices, the distributions should give users the information to make better choices. Mark one e-mail client as the preferred "light" client, and several others as preferred "well-featured" clients for various environments. Also, for categories (in Gentoo) like net-mail, provide a spreadsheet of features and which e-mail clients have those features, as well as binary-sizes, RAM-sizes, and benchmarks of run-time performance, load-time; also, user ratings.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Apple indeed quit working on Linux, but it did at one time distribute a linux system called mklinux. It was based on RedHat and had a mach kernel rather than the normal Linux kernel. Whether that makes it not Linux anymore is certainly an interesting academic question. Of course, Darwin ended up taking away a lot of the development that used to happen on mkLinux. Apparently work has gone slowly, as in the 5 years or more I have been looking at this project off and on there still has not been a "release" though it appears the site is being updated and release candidates being released.