That is the polar opposite of what I'm suggesting. The FHS is designed to tell every application where everything will be. My idea is to have every application

That is the polar opposite of what I'm suggesting. The FHS is designed to tell every application where everything will be. My idea is to have every application tell the system where everything will be. Part of the problem is systems having their own standard. What I'm suggesting would be a standard way of an application defining its own standard, which other applications or systems could interrogate and learn dynamically. It would effectively end a majority of platform-dependence, other than the platform-specific interfaces we unfortunately have to live with. > No, the app knows what services it wants to offer; ports are shared resources, so they can't be defined by each app. > On the contrary; /etc/services is part of the old paradigm, in which each application got a static port that you had to manually configure, even if you used a text file to give it a label You are missing my point. The point is to get the application to dynamically pass a service which it needs or wants to share. Ports are shared resources, but that does not mean they can't change. They are largely disposable, arbitrary numbers assigned to higher level concepts. We assign them statically because you can't easily bind one port to more than one application, and due to the inherent limitations of most protocols. There is no reason I should need to tell Docker to "map internal port 80 to external port 18080". I should only have to tell it "I'm running http, please tell whoever connects to you (Docker) that I'm running http, and give them a port to access my http service on".