Thought you all might be interested in hearing about my progress in
creating a spiritual derivative of GoboLinux. In turn I use any feedback
you have to offer.
Originally I had planed to use GoboLinux's file hierarchy with only some
minor modifications, but I have given it a great deal of contemplation and
I am thinking now of taking things an additional step forward in one
respect while taking a step back in another.
Taking the later point first, I am thinking it might be better to use the
more traditional FHS directory names with some minor modifications, not
because I think that's better --Gobo's full names are a definite
improvement. But it occurs to me that it may be easier for others to accept
in transitioning away from FHS. In other words, by providing a "migration"
path away from FHS toward something more sane might be better received then
immediately jumping to a radical departure from current standards.
On the former point, I've come up with a concept of division of the file
system into a set of user/groups. Each of these would have the exact same
file layout. Users can belong to groups which grants them access to all
that groups files. System, in Gobo terms, is just one of these user/groups
with some special files in its layout (e.g. the Kernel entries). Another
special group would be the "Common" group which is always shared by all
users.
As for the exact layout I am torn between two overarching patterns. The
more traditional pattern would keep toplevel "categorical" directories,
e.g. app, etc, home (or Programs, Settings, User in Gobo terms), but under
each of these would be a subdivision of user/group. For example:
app/
system/
common/
joe/
etc/
system/
common/
joe/
home/
system/
common/
joe/
This has the downside of separating a users file across different toplevel
directories, but its not so bad given how distinct the types of files are.
This layout also syncs well with the current FHS.
The alternative is put the user/groups on top.
system/
app/
etc/
home/
common/
app/
etc/
home/
joe/
app/
etc/
home/
While radical is a certain sense, this later design strikes me a very
compelling. It turns the whole layout on it's head. It's almost like having
Rootless in every subdirectory of the root file system. I am very curious
to learn what other think of this.
Finally I want to mention that I came up with, what I think might be good
strategy for getting a distro up and running fairly quickly while also
creating a way around a number of painful boot issues, as well as a way to
have a solid rescue system. Basically the idea is to have two distros in
one. The first is a minimal install that goes in a small primary partition.
It acts as the boot system and takes care of the initial setup of the
system after which it does a chroot over the to the main distro and goes
from there. Generally once the boot distro is setup it rarely needs to be
changed so its a perfect fallback if the main system gets hosed for some
reason. It also doesn't even have to be the exact same distro --which
allows me to start out with a minimal install of an off-the-shelf distro to
get thinks rolling. I am using Debian right now and will probably set it up
something like Damn Small Linux. (Note, I've also been considering TinyCore
but I am not sure that is mature enough to make a very helpful jumping off
point although it has more similarities with Gobo's design. I am also
considering Gentoo.) Eventually this "kickstart" OS can be the same as the
main distro once its mature enough. Why not do that right away? Well, I
suspect that setting up the init system and implementing good hardware
detection is one of the harder aspects of creating a good distro. This
would allow me to worry about those things later, and focus on the package
system and improved file hierarchy first. Please correct me if I am wrong
about this though. Maybe booting and hardware detection is easier then I
think it will be?
Okay, that's a good rundown thus far. I have few other notions, but those
can wait. Would love to hear what other think about all this.
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