Modern File Heirarchy

Matthew Miller mattdm at mattdm.org
Sun Sep 3 01:28:49 UTC 2006


On Sat, Sep 02, 2006 at 06:28:54PM -0600, Bryan Livingston wrote:
> >No filesystem hierarchy is intuitive. Therefore, until we've got a solution
> >for that, let's not muck around with the perfectly serviceable one we've
> >got.
> Directories named with plain english words are easier to understand
> than things like /etc and /usr.  Do you not see that?

No, they're just more likely to be misleading.

Did you read the part of the Gobolinux page you sent a reference to that
argues against this very claim?

> >> This is done on the windows world, and is one aspact that makes
> >> windows easier to use and more flexible than Fedora.  There are 12 env
> >Actually, it's one of the things that makes Windows a management and
> >security nightmare.
> I don't see how that is.  Having the system directory change from
> c:\winnt to c:\windows never cost me a single bit of grief, while it
> did allow for side by side installs.

But that's just the very beginning of it -- inside that directory, there's a
random forest of abstrusely named subdirectories, including a mess of
3rd-party and non-system Microsoft app trees and individual files. Oh,
including home directories. Then, there's "Program Files", which acts like a
very messy /opt, with a bunch of non-packaged managed junk. Except for
C:\Program Files\Common, which is magic. The rest of the filesystem layout
is an undefined mess.

Windows is such a bad model here that it's not really constructive to even
talk about it except as a counterexample.


> I realize that this idea is pretty drastic and don't expect you to
> like the idea at first glance.  All I'm asking is that you give it
> some serious thought rather than shoot it down out of arrogance.

I'm not. I'm shooting it down out of experience with the well-known
arguments.

I agree that the traditional hierarchy isn't all that obvious, but it's not
all that bad either. The way forward isn't incremental mucking with what
things are called, but in rethinking the basic assumptions of the model.
(Start with "why a hierarchy?")

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>




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