[openbeos] Re: More misc ideas

>Hi,
>
>On Fri 2001-10-26 (17:13), Gabe Bauman wrote:
>> Yes, lib, bin, usr, etc are UNIX conventions, but the BeOS is not UNIX.
>> I don't care how many server admins are used to those terms, the average
>> joe is not. Honestly, if you hadn't used UNIX before, would you
>> understand that /etc is the settings folder, or that /usr/local is
>> machine specific stuff? The 3-letter UNIX-style directory names are
>> legacy cruft that should be brought up to 1995 standards.
>> 
>> Don't get me wrong, I can live with UNIX and use it on a daily basis,
>> but I think it's pretty badly laid out.
>
>I completely agree (and I'm writing this from a FreeBSD system).  When I
>first started using unix a while back, my first thought upon hearing that
>/etc was where settings were kept was "WTF!!  That's retarded, I'd never
>have guessed!".  Now, of course, it's second nature to me ;) But why
>complicate things when you can explicitly have a folder called "settings" or
>something?

Yes, classic UNIX folder logic is ... cryptic, to say the least.

>> To put my ideas in simpler fashion, I see three "scopes" in system
>> layout:
>> 
>> 1. The system scope (OS settings, libs, programs, binaries, servers)
>> 2. The global scope (system-wide user settings, libs, programs,
>> binaries)=20
>> 3. The local scope (user home, single user libs, programs, binaries,
>> settings)
>
>Gabe, could you elaborate on differences between the system and global
>scopes?  Is one more resistant to having things replaced than the other, or
>something?  If you've laid this difference out in a previous email, I must
>not have "got it" :)

The way I see it, system == what we ship. Global == things like drivers that
users install, apps that users install. Stuff that every user on a multi-user 
system
should have access to. Local = MY stuff. C:\Windows\profiles\michael if I were
using Windows. 

>> I think rigidity and forced organization is a good thing on any
>> operating system. I would like to see BeOS become very strongly
>> structured. Structure is our friend.
>
>Note that structure is not *always* your friend.  For example, the structure
>in WinXP bugs me: I keep images in a separate partition, and the OS's
>insistence that it should be in the "My Pictures" folder on my C: drive is
>incredibly annoying.  If you have a structure, make sure that it has a
>flexible foundation - in my example, the way to do this would be to ensure
>that you can set a single folder (of your choosing) to be "My Images".

I would like to step out of the whole disk paradigm for a moment. Why
do end users CARE that their available disk space is on 4 different drives?
For that matter, why do most users even care about 95% of the disk?
They want THEIR stuff and stuff that is intended to be shared with them
(shared docs, etc). Users should never HAVE TO see anything else on the
disk. It should also ALWAYS be easily accessible, if they chose to.

Look at BeOS now. I can mount a new disk as /images, put a link to it in
~/images and never know that I have 2 disks.

>Please don't take this to mean I'm against structure - I'm just against an
>inflexible structure that cannot be altered by the user (e.g. if I want my
>setting on a different parition, I should be able to specify the
>SETTINGS_ROOT or whatever as a folder on that partition)....

Me neither. One think that is very neat about BeOS (and other "real" 
file systems) is that with hard links, we can make everything different, yet
the same. We can design our own hierarchy and mount it as /new_dir, where 
it contains nothing but hard links into the old hierarchy. Maybe the next 
release, 
we nuke the old structure, moving all of the data to the new and making the old
structure all links.

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