On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 04:09:13PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> Branden Robinson writes:
> > Well, then, we immediately throw away the advantage that a single directory
> > name gives us.
>
> What are those?
It makes searching simple.
It guarantees no name collisions in the image filenames themselves (rather,
dpkg would catch them for us and they'd have to be fixed). This helps
prevent confusion like ("which xterm-linux.xpm are you talking about?").
It makes window manager configuration easy. One path fits all.
> > We already have several directories in our system that are unspeakably
> > unwieldy for a human to browse, why should /usr/share/images be any
> > different?
>
> A practice of historical misdesignes and disregard for scalability is no
> reason for perpertuating such stupidity on other parts of the system.
Well, first let's get some quantitative data on just how stupid it would
be.
Do we even have 2600 (to pick a number out of thin air) general-purpose
image files in our distribution that would go in such a directory?
> I know exactly how the system reacts. Ext2 filesystem does a linear search
> to find filenames. I have 2600 files in /var/lib/dpkg/info, and an ls -l in
> there takes about 4 seconds, this on a Dual PIII with fast wide scsi drives.
Well, maybe that's more properly perceived as a limitation of the ext2
filesystem. FS development for Linux is hardly at a standstill, you know,
and we should let historical misdesigns and a disregard for scalability
mislead us into believing they will endure forever. :)
My biggest objection is that we haven't yet got any kind of proposal for
subdivision of /usr/share/images. Who wants to come up with one? Hint: it
would be best if we didn't have to hack every window manager in existence
to support it, and if we didn't have to modify window managers' config
files everytime a new package containing images was installed or removed.
--
G. Branden Robinson | If you make people think they're
Debian GNU/Linux | thinking, they'll love you;
branden@ecn.purdue.edu | but if you really make them think,
cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | they'll hate you.
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