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GoboLinux Compile -- A Scalable Portage?
LodeRunner continues "We already have ebuilds, RPM .spec files, and whatnot. The argument for reinventing the wheel yet again was the observation that while developing apps to handle these files is easy, the task of maintaining the ever-growing database of compilation scripts is the real problem -- the huge package collection of Debian comes to mind. Compile took the extreme minimalistic approach, and its scripts ("recipes") are as small as can be: the script for a typical autoconf-based program takes two lines.
Knowledge for handling common situations is usually added to Compile itself instead of being coded in the script (for example, apps that need a separate build directory just add a needs_build_dir=yes line). The plan is to make Compile as smart as it can and the recipes as small as possible.It remains to be seen whether this experiment of gauging differently the tradeoff between flexibility and simplicity will prove itself to be limiting or enlightening, but in the ~six months Compile has been in beta test by the people from the GoboLinux mailing list, over 500 recipes were written, ranging from Glibc and GCC up to KDE and the Linux kernel itself."
When i first changed to gentoo I was gladly surprised by the power and flexability of portage. If this is half as good it is worthy a place in the linux community, no doubt about it!
Just because you have a Unixish kernel does not mean you have to have a Unixish operating system.
Surprisingly, not everything in the world has to be Unix!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
It's much more difficult to make a typo in /etc than /System/Config. That's one of the godsends of the POSIX structure over that of Windows - /lib is easier to remember/type than C:\Windows\System32. And there are none of those annoying spaces in /usr/bin that exist in C:\Program Files.
Having created build scripts in FreeBSD, Gentoo, Sourcemage, and Arch Linux, I think the most important goal is to use/develop a script language that newbies find easy to use.
If you're developing a new distro, and you're concerned about giving users a reason to move, focus on making it easy for us to add to the distro!
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
I like how they post lost of screenshots running window managers. They could have just said "it runs KDE." It's not like their KDE is anything special, it's the underlying structure that's different. Then again, every distro does this. However, this distro is targetting people who most likely understand this concept already.
Me, I like my three letter unpronounceable paths all the same :)
/usr/bin and /lib are both easy to pronounce: "user-bin" and, well, "lib". /etc is really the only hard one.
I don't mean to nitpick, but
Blasphemy my ass. i have been using Linux, BSD, nd other UNIX derivatives for over 10 years now, and all I can say is THANK GOD.
/usr/bin, /etc, /usr/local concept is totally outdated. Having apps in their own directories eases maitenence, eases administration, and eases uninstallation. Think about it, if apps were in their own self contained directories, who even *needs* a package manger? To install, you extract the tar, to uninstall, delete the directory. Boom snap, done and done.
The
Other than core system configuration and core libraries the whole system uses, I ideally think *any app should be totally confined to one directory level. IMO this is one thing Windows does right.
They're trying to replace an arcane directory structure, not mask it.
The descriptive path thing sounds a lot like what OS X does, except that it goes all the way where OS X still has /usr, /etc, etc. although hidden. I wonder if Apple can patent or has patented that?
Yes, simplicity is good, but only in the context of the whole system. Here, you're just shifting complexity from the per-package scripts to the overall Compile package itself -- creating a large, central, monolithic service.
Because it's centralized, over time, this is going to accumulate a lot crap and become opaque, obfuscated, and unmaintainable. Changes and maintenance to Compile will more significantly impact the contemporary set of recipes than, say, changes to Portage and ebuilds.
It's easy to apply a good idea, like "simplicity", in too narrow of a scope -- to the detrement of the overall design. Better to think about it as balance of "package maintainability", "system maintainability", "barrier of entry", etc.
When the poster mentioned
/System/Settings/X11
/System/Links/Tasks ,as the article mentions
/usr itself pains lazy idiots like me with the capital X; I shudder to think as to what'd happen if this, in case, becomes the standard (or the fad)
I had thought, he/she was trying to be funny
But the distro does seem to go this way :
Despite the intuitiveness, having capitals at the beginning of all the directories, particularly the ones that you are going to replace all the / dirs with, would be a major pain atleast in a case-sensitive *nix world
The current 'X11R6' in
(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)
You are welcome to alias them to whatever you want, but it wont help you understand your next door neighbour's Unix system, or your next employer's either.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
/etc is really the only hard one.
Pronounce it the same as you would if you saw it in a normal sentence, "et cetera".
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
Yeah, but who the hell starts them with capital letters?!?!?!
Even with tab-completion, I just got my time quadrupled! Frickin' shift keys.
Then many of the binaries in /usr/bin became 'standard' parts of distributions, and we started using /usr/local/bin for user contributed binaries ... Now /usr/local is becomming the standard place for 'standard-nonstandard' binaries
/bin is for binaries that you need to use the system in single user mode (i.e. no 'user' involved). /usr/bin is for binaries that a user might want to use, like those of your average set of applications. /usr/local/bin is for binaries that are local to the machine.
/usr mounted via NFS then. Say you have a few graphically-oriented machines in your lab.. Perhaps they would have their graphical applications in their /usr/local/bin, since they only apply to the local machine.
/usr/bin, and some local ones in /usr/local/bin, it would be great if they all transparently appeared in /Applications/$AppName..
You know what they're really for?
*
*
*
Why the separation? Imagine you run a lab full of computers.. chances are that they'll have the same main applications. Well, you can have
I imagine that many people won't need that degree of separation, but it's there should you need it. If you don't need it and desire simplicity, just mask it with some symlinks.
On the subject of the main article, I could imagine, with perhaps some filesystem tweaks with regards to symlinks, that a filesystem along the lines of GoboLinux's could be very useful indeed. I'm not quite so sure about *replacing* the current hierarchy rather than just *masking* it, but perhaps some two-way strategy can be used...
I mean, if I have some apps in
That would be cool.
Anything I compile myself goes in
Believe it or not, most things in unix are they way they are for a reason. That reason may not be immediately obvious to you, but it still exists.
While I'm used to the current paths, I have no hard feelings at all about ditching them.
I don't know if there's a linux standard for what kinds of files go in each directory but everyone I ask has a different answer.
I think switching to an updated naming scheme for directories and getting a common installation/uninstallation routine for applications that actually sticks items on the menus in the guis, etc. would be a huge move forward.
Not that I need either feature. I don't even use a linux gui. But someday maybe I will.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
There is plenty.
There are several languages where lowercase -> uppercase -> lowercase can't be done without losing data, for example. Then there is the problem of how many languages you can support. Say, English is easy, but what happens when you find a disk with filenames in an encoding the filesystem doesn't know about?
In Linux, it's just all bytes, it doesn't care if it's english, cyrillic or whatever. With case insensitivity it suddenly has to know what to do with cyrillic letters as well.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The simplest and most obvious reason to make the computer case sensitive is because it's much, much easier to program that way. Any time you want to know if two filenames are the same you can just compare them bit by bit and see if they're exactly equal. Making the computer understand which characters are upper or lower case versions of which other ones adds some complication in a coding system as simple as ASCII. If you want to use something more complex, like Unicode, the problems multiply tremendously. Including a full Unicode library in the kernel- which you'd need to do in order to make things case insensitive at the filesystem level- would be a source of innumerable bugs and performance problems.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
At least, so long as the system uses shared libraries.
:P
MS-DOS was the only OS(that needed an install, Atari DOS wouldn't count there) where I really had a "clean" install the whole way through. Programs went in x, drivers in y. Everything using DOS4GW had a copy of it included with the binary, no harm done. Needless to say, configs also went alongside the binary.
Of course, this falls apart as soon as you have a more complex OS that needs things like scripting languages and windowing systems. There's just no way around shared libraries. And with shared libraries comes other kinds of shared access - to data and devices. So you have to reorganize, create new structures to hold certain kinds of files. Version conflicts, missing depends - all result from this necessity.
Of course, these structures just won't make any sense to the end user, except as a programmer. It won't matter how much you try to polish it up. A project like this might help, but putting an end to it all would probably need something along the lines of an FS and binary format revision, to include more data like the version number and purpose for each file. Good luck doing that....
It's confusing and convoluted as hell.
In what way? What are you going to find in Applications other than applications?
there are applications left and right
Unless you're actively moving things around, all of your applications will end up in one place -- Applications.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
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