From: marcf@nexus.yorku.ca (Marc G Fournier) Subject: Re: A discipline for packages Date: 30 Dec 1992 05:12:26 GMT
nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) writes:
>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).
So? Install DOS
>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.
Geez...that would make one messy file system...everything
symlinked to everything else.
>Then, when you wanted to remove a package, you'd just rm -r
>/package/name, then re-run the symlinks builder.
Most Unix Operating Systems I've used have both an install
and an uninstall command that does the same as rm -r would do
to a /package/name directory
>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.
I think this guy is warped by DOS :(
>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.
I don't see a benefit to this at all. On top of the inefficiency
of it all...you would be wasting a hell of a lot of i-nodes doing this
as well (among probably a hundred other things)
Marc