[haiku-development] Re: Question about /system and /boot/system

  • From: Truls Becken <truls.becken@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2011 00:04:11 +0100

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 20:25, Oliver Tappe wrote:

> when looking at the restructured folder hierarchy with respect to
> find_directory(), I have realized that it has become quite a mess :-\
>
> This is the current hierarchy (in the pm branch):
>
> [..snip..]
>
> For starters, I wonder where /system should point to: currently, /system
> points to /boot/system, but that folder just contains the 'packages'
> subfolder. While correct in principle, it means that stuff like /system/bin
> and /system/add-ons no longer work. I have no idea whether or not that is
> going to be a problem with many legacy applications and/or scripts.

In a thread back in january [1], I made a suggestion about letting
/boot/system and /boot/common be both the package-fs mount point and
at the same time hold a couple of "real" directories (packages,
settings). I don't know if anybody noticed and considered it as an
option back then, but it might solve some problems.

As far as I can see, it has these (dis)advantages:

+ Good for backward compatibility
+ Short (sane) paths to e.g. /boot/system/apps
+ No need for B_SYSTEM_PACKAGES_CONTENTS
- Confusing to have package contents mangled with actual folders
- Can't use both package based and manually organized files, as in [2]

What you would end up with is:

boot
        common
                add-ons
                apps
                bin
                develop
                ...
                packages
                settings
        system
                add-ons
                apps
                bin
                develop
                ...
                packages
                settings

[1]: 
//www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Package-management-folder-hierarchy,11
[2]: 
//www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/r40675-in-haikubranchesfeaturespackagemanagement-buildjam-buildscripts-datasystemboot-headersosstorage-srcsystembootloader,5

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