From: nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) Subject: A discipline for packages Date: 30 Dec 1992 03:35:56 GMT
You know something I've always hated about Unix (and people are
starting to hate about Windows)?
When you install a package, it inserts itself inextricably into
various places in your system.
What I would rather see is a subdirectory per package. For example,
/package/sendmail (and the corresponding subdirectories lib, src, cf,
man.1, man.5, man.8, bin, etc).
This seems a lot cleaner than every program in the world inserting
itself into /etc, /usr/lib/, /usr/bin, /usr/man,
/usr/local/lib/package, etc. Of course, you'd still need to have
these things inserted into the standard places, so that it still
looked like a Unix machine. But this could be done through the use
of symbolic links and a program that automatically created them. It
would walk through /package/*/bin for things to put into /usr/bin,
/package/*/man* for things to put into /usr/man/man*, /package/*/etc
for things to put into /etc.
Then, when you wanted to remove a package, you'd just rm -r
/package/name, then re-run the symlinks builder.
Of course, chasing down all these symlinks is going to make your
system less efficient. But that's solvable by creating cache files,
and gradually improving programs so that they look in the cache files
instead of at the symlinks. Of course, the cache files get
automatically built also.
And, of course, the symlinks builder could also be told to look in
places other than /package.
Why don't I just go off and do this myself? Well, because the chief
benefit comes from easy package installation/removal. These benefits
don't come unless people *do* it.
-russ <nelson@crynwr.com> What canst *thou* say?
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