[RFC] User Accesable Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

[Michael A. Peters]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 06:53, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 16:39 +0300, Doncho N. Gunchev wrote:
> >     I really dislike all these hidden dotfiles/dotdirs in my home directory
> > and am happy to see someone is working on this. I was thinking it would be
> > better if we had ~/etc/bashrc instead of ~/.bashrc and so on, but I see much
> > more general ideas here, so here's what I think looking at it:
> 
> ~/{bin|etc|...}/ is a lot worse than
> ~/.{bin|etc|...}/
> 
> But what's really good is to have:
> 
> ~/.YouNameIt/{bin|etc|...}
> 
> YouNameIt could be something like 'myapps_root' whatever.
> 
> I think a ~/.distributionName/{bin|etc|...} doesn't make a lot of sense.

I personally don't like the idea.
If I want a bin directory in my home directory - export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

The problem I see is security. A virus can not alter binaries it does
not have permission to alter, and that is why binaries, config files,
default templates, etc. should be installed with root ownership by the
root user.

Another issue is dependency resolution. Either everything in these
directories is going to have to be static linked - or when the user
upgrades their system they are going to have broken binaries, and that's
no fun at all.

Another issues is updates - they will not be able to be managed by the
central system update system. In win XP - I hate having to launch an
application in order to check for updates - but this is the case with
most of the non MS apps on that system.

I think a better solution is simply to make it easy for end users to use
the facilities of yum or apt or whatever the distro has implemented.

Put in a cdrom and the repository of packages gets added to the package
management facility for the purpose of installing the software on the CD
(and at the same time grabbing needed dependencies from the distro
repository). It can add the PGP sig for the vendor as well, and add the
vendors update repository - so that there still is one app that a user
needs to use to update all software on their system.

Yes - it means knowing the root password to install software. Cry me a
river. It's the right way to do it, encouraging users to install
software in their home directories is imho a recipe for disaster. That
should only be done by developers who are testing their code, and know
how to launch an app that isn't in their path.

-- 
Cheap Linux CD's - http://mpeters.us/linux/