Directory structures in the future and other things I want.

Stephen John Smoogen smooge at gmail.com
Fri Mar 28 00:05:23 UTC 2008


2008/3/27 Martin Sourada <martin.sourada at gmail.com>:
>
>  On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 15:57 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>  > I dont know if this is a thread hijack, but I felt this was a better
>  > name than the previous threads subject. If it is.. my apologies..
>  >
>  > My main 2 things I would like:
>  >
>  > 1) If we were to say get rid of /usr/bin, /bin, or /sbin etc.. Heck I
>  > wouldn't mind if it wasn't named something people could understand
>  > like: /SystemPrograms/ . I justwould like to see it come from a joint
>  > Linux taskforce so that it's not just yet another OS weirdness. I say
>  > this because I am currently having to rewrite my .profile to deal with
>  > our growing HP-UX, AIX, SuSE, Red Hat, Solaris, and CygWin
>  > environment. Everyone but Linux seems to stick things in weird spots
>  > or you are expected to know that you can't use /opt/bin/blah all the
>  > time because its a symlink and it breaks on this blah blah blah.
>  >
>  Hm.. I'd keep the standard unix structure... I think it's quite well
>  thought through and proved working... /SystemPrograms/ would suck a lot,
>  first it uses capital letters, second it's too long and third it is less
>  understandable than /bin (or /sbin or /usr/lib or /usr/share is supposed
>  to be it?)...

It was meant to be a ludicrous example..  My main aim is that if it
were to be all reorganized to be simpler and more understandable by
'humans' versus geeks-with-too-much-Unix that such decisions are done
outside of one small cabal unless thats their SIG/SpecialGroup etc..
but more done by something where other distros have a say in it.

[But on the other hand.. is /system/programs, /system/documents,
/system/configurations (or some shorter version config) more
understandable to a human new to computers or is /usr/etc ]

>
>  > 2) One thing that Jesse and Seth brought up was the one major RPM
>  > breakage that comes up every other release about why we can't do
>  > something really cool. And that is the problem with symlinks and I
>  > think directories. I would rather us do something really really
>  > radical like going to a package system that deals with that than
>  > moving items from /sbin, /usr/sbin/, /usr/myosrocks/sbin etc.
>  >
>  +1, but rather than going to another packaging system, it would be
>  better to fix the current one...
>
>
>  > 3) I think I will +1 Bills very clear fix: Just add /sbin:/usr/sbin to
>  > everyone's path. Deal with 1 and 2 after 9 is out the door, and
>  > probably shoot for it to be 11 earliest (or if we never go to 10 or
>  > 11.. whatever the next series is called :)).
>  >
>  -10. In /sbin and /usr/sbin aren't binaries supposed to be run by
>  average user and some of them even does not work with insufficient
>  privileges. If you insist on using them you should be proficient enough
>  to be able to add it to your path yourself.
>

I guess this the real issue. What is a normal user these days? Why can
a user get the equivalent of lsusb/lspci via Gnome/KDE but not
normally as a user. Should those have been put in some 'protected'
area so that their .desktop and executables are only available if you
are root.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"




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