At 11:40 AM 11/27/02, you wrote:
The file system is anything but perfect in its current state. I'm not suggesting throwing everything in the root of /. I don't think anyone suggested that. Frankly though I know your looking for an argument for the sake of an argument if you're going to sit there and tell me that the file system couldn't or doesn't need to be cleaned up, or "de-cluttered" as I put it before. Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting anything overly radical, but the file system really does need work.The problem is not with the Linux directory structure but with the misuse of the structure by Linux applications. Applications are not necessarily installed in the correct places. XFree is a good example of this. It and other applications like Mozilla which install to /usr/lib/app_name/ are what clutter things up. Why do we have binaries under /usr/lib? If the applications used the directory structure properly it would clear up a lot of the clutter up.
As far as how it would be decluttered... Well for starters config files under /etc should follow a more standard format and be combined where possible for like services. I shouldn't have to go under /etc/X11, for example, and find a million config files just to make one little change to XWindows. I get annoyed having to sit there waiting for grep to look through every single file, just to find the file you need to edit. At least if like services used a single config file you would know for sure what settings are in what file. Often between distributions they create their own special config files to do various things. I see this as adding to clutter and confusion. With a standard file for like services, distributions (i hope) would be more inclined to use these files rather than invent their own config files. This, in my mind, would be a major step toward de-cluttering the Linux file system.
Here is a day-to-day benifit. I have to sit there for close to a half an hour on an older machine waiting for a bloody directory listing to finnish(try doing this in /usr/bin). I think it is very evident that something is wrong with the file system when that is the case. The day that isn't the case, yes I would see that as a real day-to-day benifit.
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