On 10/03/2021 03:08, Cmdte Alpha Tigre Z wrote: > > Hello. > > While I was making my research before installing Debian > I saw that the filesystem hierarchy is not so friendly > (I'm new to GNU/Linux operating systems). > How is the filesystem "unfriendly"? It's a filing system. It's purpose is to make it easier to find files. > > I saw there was a distribution called GoboLinux which > addressed that inconvenience, but according to a DistroWatch review, > it is not usable at all. > Looking briefly at the GoboLinux website, it groups files by program (so you get paths like /Programs/GTK+/1.2.10/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0.9.1). What you have there is a difference in philosophy (you might want to read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S Raymond for a good primer on some of the philosophy behind Linux). GoboLinux (and Microsoft Windows) are espousing the philosophy that libraries "belong" to a program. "This is *my* GTK library. No, no you can't use it!". But the UNIX (and, by extension, Linux) philosophy is that libraries are fundamentally shared. "Here's a library for drawing doodads. If anyone wants to draw doodads, they can use it". So, the filesystem on Linux reflects that. Libraries go here, binaries (applications which the user actually calls) go over there and so on. Neither approach is inherently better than the other. And both approaches allow for some usage the other way. On Linux, you can make /opt/some-external-program and dump all of that external programs binaries, libaries, data files there. On Windows, it's not unheard of for applications to drop libraries into C:\Windows\System32, knowing that that's a shared folder which anyone can reach. > In my opinion, I think there would be no need to make another distro > to make such customizations to the system, it would be better > if it were implemented at a package level on an existing distro. > I think you're wrong here, though. It WOULD be necessary to make another distro. If you say to developers "you can put your libraries into /usr/lib *or* /Program/$pkgname/Libraries/", then you're going to have problems. Look at the issues currently happening because Debian has said "You can uses SysV *or* systemd": not every package is at the same level of parity there. Perhaps this is something that could be implemented by the base operating system, but then we come back to the original question of WHY? What's WRONG with the current filesystem hierarchy, in your opinion? You stated that it's "unfriendly", but without backing up that assertion. > So, my question is: Is there a way to put another, more friendly, > filesystem hierarchy to Debian, like the one of GoboLinux? > > Thanks in advance for your answers. >
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