4 ms·

You can't criticise "modern UNIX" in general based on the ugliness of the filesystem hierarchy of one system. Edit: or most systems, the point is that the ugli

by nsajko 11y ago

You can't criticise "modern UNIX" in general based on the ugliness of the filesystem hierarchy of one system. Edit: or most systems, the point is that the ugliness is not intrinsic to unix-likes

Someone1234 11y ago
That's fair. Which modern UNIX variant has a nice filesystem layout and has modernised etc?
- pjc50 11y ago
  Define "modern" and "nice". (This sounds flippant, but is actually important as these are completely subjective. The answer may turn out to be OSX..)
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    Who has legitimately tried to improve upon either or both? Even if the definitions are subjective the problems are easier to quantify, and thus we can say improvement has achieved if the problems are lessened.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      GoboLinux, I suppose. Can't say I'm personally a big fan of it, but many have given it notice.
- nsajko 11y ago
  Archlinux has it a bit simpler than most; with /bin /sbin /usr/sbin all symlinked to /usr/bin. GoboLinux has something completely different from the FHS.
- tangent128 11y ago
  http://www.gobolinux.org/ http://www.gobolinux.org/ has a fun filesystem layout experiment, at least.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Something similar is NixOS (uses systemd) and Guix (uses DMD). Edit: note that Gobolinux came to be without demanding that everything in the Linux ecosystem danced to their pipe.
  - sjwright 11y ago
    That's awesome, way better than the status quo.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Appreciate the link. They did a clean-slate redesign with better usage and backward compatibility. Excellent work.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Been using it for a few years (i think the actual install was 013, updated over time to something akin to 014, so i still have /system/Links rather than /System/Index) and i keep being surprised how many tarballs i can basically go "MakeRecipe Foobar x.y.z example.com" on and follow it up with a "Compile Foobar" to get it installed if there is not already a recipe in the repo. Some larger projects are a fair bit more hairy however (Hello Mozilla) and i think people basically gave up getting Gnome to play along... Also the guy that did the 015 release claimed he spent more time getting the whole consolekit+polkit+desktop rigmarole working than getting the kernel and such going.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        I believe it. I've paused with a "wtf" look on my face plenty of times dealing with the complexity and many odd decisions of those. It's what made me briefly use Fluxbox/Openbox distro's just to avoid the complexity. A bit too manual on the app side, though, so I reluctantly went back to a more full desktop environment. I'm sure we'll continue to see more competition in that area and maybe a solid alternative in the future to what we have.
  - potatosareok 11y ago

by nsajko 11y ago

You can't criticise "modern UNIX" in general based on the ugliness of the filesystem hierarchy of one system. Edit: or most systems, the point is that the ugliness is not intrinsic to unix-likes

Someone1234 11y ago

That's fair. Which modern UNIX variant has a nice filesystem layout and has modernised etc?

pjc50 11y ago
Define "modern" and "nice". (This sounds flippant, but is actually important as these are completely subjective. The answer may turn out to be OSX..)
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Who has legitimately tried to improve upon either or both? Even if the definitions are subjective the problems are easier to quantify, and thus we can say improvement has achieved if the problems are lessened.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    GoboLinux, I suppose. Can't say I'm personally a big fan of it, but many have given it notice.
nsajko 11y ago
Archlinux has it a bit simpler than most; with /bin /sbin /usr/sbin all symlinked to /usr/bin. GoboLinux has something completely different from the FHS.
tangent128 11y ago
http://www.gobolinux.org/ http://www.gobolinux.org/ has a fun filesystem layout experiment, at least.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Something similar is NixOS (uses systemd) and Guix (uses DMD). Edit: note that Gobolinux came to be without demanding that everything in the Linux ecosystem danced to their pipe.
- sjwright 11y ago
  That's awesome, way better than the status quo.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Appreciate the link. They did a clean-slate redesign with better usage and backward compatibility. Excellent work.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Been using it for a few years (i think the actual install was 013, updated over time to something akin to 014, so i still have /system/Links rather than /System/Index) and i keep being surprised how many tarballs i can basically go "MakeRecipe Foobar x.y.z example.com" on and follow it up with a "Compile Foobar" to get it installed if there is not already a recipe in the repo. Some larger projects are a fair bit more hairy however (Hello Mozilla) and i think people basically gave up getting Gnome to play along... Also the guy that did the 015 release claimed he spent more time getting the whole consolekit+polkit+desktop rigmarole working than getting the kernel and such going.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I believe it. I've paused with a "wtf" look on my face plenty of times dealing with the complexity and many odd decisions of those. It's what made me briefly use Fluxbox/Openbox distro's just to avoid the complexity. A bit too manual on the app side, though, so I reluctantly went back to a more full desktop environment. I'm sure we'll continue to see more competition in that area and maybe a solid alternative in the future to what we have.
- potatosareok 11y ago