Justin Bengtson wrote:
> here we go again.
>
> so, redhat isn't the distro for me. i don't like the RPM system (which also
> rules out mandrake and a host of other distros...) debian just gives me
> headaches nowadays. slackware is inadvertantly (or not) tied up in that bob
> dobbs crap and thus is not for me.
>
> LFS is all that's left
Au contraire. Here is a partial list of distributions, which shows
that you've barely scratched the surface.
http://lwn.net/Distributions/
> after seeing Mac OS X, i've decided that i really don't like
> all of the "four letter wurds" used as a directory structure. it's just
> damn unsightly. my command line should be pretty.
Here's what Neal Stephenson says (from In the Beginning Was the
Command Line):
The file systems of Unix machines all have the same general
structure. On your flimsy operating systems, you can create
directories (folders) and give them names like Frodo or My
Stuff and put them pretty much anywhere you like. But under
Unix the highest level--the root--of the filesystem is
always designated with the single character "/" and it
always contains the same set of top-level directories:
/usr /etc /var /bin /proc /boot /home /root /sbin /dev /lib /tmp
and each of these directories typically has its own distinct
structure of subdirectories. Note the obsessive use of
abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a
system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder
is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to
three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.
This is not the place to try to explain why each of the
above directories exists, and what is contained in it. At
first it all seems obscure; worse, it seems deliberately
obscure. When I started using Linux I was accustomed to
being able to create directories wherever I wanted and to
give them whatever names struck my fancy. Under Unix you are
free to do that, of course (you are free to do anything) but
as you gain experience with the system you come to
understand that the directories listed above were created
for the best of reasons and that your life will be much
easier if you follow along (within /home, by the way, you
have pretty much unlimited freedom).
After this kind of thing has happened several hundred or
thousand times, the hacker understands why Unix is the way
it is, and agrees that it wouldn't be the same any other
way. It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix
hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of
calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the
Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products,
contrived by engineers in the service of specific
companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it
is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker
subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
He says it much better than I. But on to the specifics.
> 1. aside from FHS concerns, what is stopping me from re-naming 'lib' to
> 'libraries', dropping 'bin' and 'sbin' into one directory called 'binaries',
> naming 'etc' 'config', etc?
You'll have to change approximately 500 programs that know where
stuff lives. Every shell script ever written will break. Every
Makefile. Most autoconf/automake scripts.
Aside from those, it'll be a piece of cake.
> 3. i'm not that naive. i'll need to write a script to alter makefiles and
> such when compiling. i noticed when installing xmountains that there is a
> 'Imakefile' file (which re-wrote the paths for the makefile for each
> individual system...) which worked quite nicely. does anybody know of a
> generic version of said file that can be re-written to work with Justin's
> File Hierarchy? or am i on my own?
You're on your own.
> b. do any of you honestly think this will work?
I think you could get a get a minimally functional system within
a year.
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
