At 20:04 Uhr -0500 09.01.2003, Jason Deraleau wrote:
Understood, I just wanted to clarify this before people start thinking they were asked to vote :-)Just to clarify this, there is nothing to vote on here. There are no serious reasons to abandon /sw, but many good reasons not to do it - one of them being backward compatibility, we don't want to force 99% of fink users to redo their complete fink installation.My vote is for /opt/fink.
I realize there's not a vote going on, it was just an expression.
Serious reasons to abandon /sw? Well, there is the factor of /sw not being a standard directory in any distribution of *nix I've ever encountered, which is an initial hurdle to someone who is new to the platform ("mrtg is in /sw/bin? Who'd have thunk it").However, we are *not* a *nix distribution! To get Fink you have to install it yourself. And if you install it yourself and fail to notice that you just installed it into /sw... uhm, well, sorry, but then you have to suffer. Some people just have to learn it the hard way. Besides, if we installed in /opt, it would be exactly the same problem. If the main concern is that /opt is not visible from the Finder, well, we could hide /sw during bootstrap, if people think that would be a good thing.
/opt is something a few people will recognize, but for the vast majority of Unix systems I ever worked on, there is no /opt either, so nothing really gets easier. Besides, DarwinPorts is now using it, so we would get into a mess there, I fear.
Also, like I mentioned in my email, if you have someone who is not very Unix savvy using the machine (either the person installing Fink or say Grandma), they might delete the sw folder accidentally because it's visible by default.You give your Grandma admin rights to your machine? Well... what if she accidentally deletes the System directory? I have met few newbies that go around and randomly delete stuff on their HD that they don't know. More common in this area are people who believe they are pro's and then go around and randomly delete stuff they don't know, but that's really an off-topic :-)
Anyway, this would be avoided by making /sw inivisible form the Finder. That wouldn't be too hard to do. Maybe an idea for our bootstrap script, and also maybe worth an entry in the FAQ ("How can I hide the /sw directory in Finder?").
So what about a gradual transition? Have the selfupdate-cvs start using /opt/fink and do a symlink temporarily until the majority of the userbase is using /opt/fink. Recompile the binary installation so new users will be using /opt/fink. I realize that the /opt folder gets used by some thing (for example, Apache2 on MOSX Server), but I'm sure even Apple would adhere to leaving the /opt folder alone.Ehrm, I just don't see any reason to do this. You stated two "reasons:"
1) Invisibility in Finder: we can get that easily for /sw, too
2) "Standard compliance": I don't think that these "standards" really apply to us here, we are in a unique situation. And even if I would accept this, it seems a very small justification.
Max
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Max Horn
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