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If I Had My Own Distro...

Posted by michael on from the DIY dept.

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."

2 of 712 comments (clear)

  1. (MHS) Modern Hierarchy Standard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    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: /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

    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 /Apps directory rather than cramming everything into /usr.

    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.

  2. Re:"If I had my own distro..." by rifter · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.