On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 08:01:53AM +0200, Norbert Nemec wrote: > That discussion about the structuring of the home directories is nothing > hurd-specific at all. First it is something, the applications have to take > care of - and except for a limited set of tool, most programs are written > for UN*I-compatible systems in general.
Hurd is not only a kernel/OS IT is also a place where UNIX design mistakes are fixed o be used wider. We have already one big success - GRUB bootloader did spead very widely and will very probably overnumber LILO in next two years (my biased idea). > Since forcing app-developers to do something in a certain way can't work, it > would be a thing to be enforced by the distribution, i.e. Debian would have > to adopt it as a policy and the packagers would then have to change the > paths in the .deb packages. In most cases, this is one #define to change per 5 package (most don't use any configs in ~/). If we show new way, people may accept it or decline it. If nobody even tried, we would all be stucked with QWERTies > Debian GNU/HURD should not try do things too much different from Debian > GNU/Linux - that would just mean slowing down the package-porting process. Not much slowing down, I think. If we had more logical structure, we would have less changes in future, so overall work will be the same or less correcting Unix misconceptions (as with /usr). > Therefore, if one really succeeds in convincing the Debian community to > adopt that policy, that's fine. Anyhow - I do not believe you'll get a > majority for that idea... Majority would probably decline lack of /usr, just due to old stupid habit, GNU/Hurd is to break all old stupid habits. Remember that Debian GNU/Hurd is quite independent distribution, only using the same packager and package base, and some infrastructure and we should make Debian GNU/Hurd as good as we can, not as Linux-like as possible, because no-one would like use Debian GNU/Hurd if it were just Debian GNU/Linux emulator over Mach microkernel.
