[haiku-development] Re: [Haiku PM] compatibility with software from Haikuware
- From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:58:56 +0200
On 09/25/2013 02:31 AM, Jessica Hamilton wrote:
Whilst there's already a physical file-system layout to [mostly] match
what should be expected from a non-PM point of view, the whole
"non-packaged" thing completely takes away from the simplicity of Haiku.
And given that you've already implemented the equivalent of a union
filesystem, perhaps the ideal would be to get rid of the read-only
directories, and use the "non-packaged" directories as writeable overlays.
packagefs is not the equivalent of a union FS. It only has a single
read-only layer. Having at least two layers with a writable top layer is
what makes a union FS relatively complex.
This way, stuff could still be manually written to the packagefs mount
points, with the writes being transparently passed through to the
underlying filesystem under "non-packaged".
Of course, I'd expect files from packages themselves to still remain
read-only. A possible upshot of this may be that you could even shadow
files that come from packages. You could go so far to allowing what
appears to be changes to package files by transparently copying them
into the underlying filesystem and making modifications there.
Stephan already replied to that, but let me add/stress two points:
When looking at the file system you would no longer be able to see (at
least not easily) which files stem from packages and which don't.
White-outs and shadowed files will add quite a bit of confusion,
particularly when updating the packages underneath them. This is not
making things simpler, IMO.
Once most software has been packaged, the non-packaged directories will
only rarely, if ever, be used by most users. I don't think the concept
that non-packaged stuff has to be installed in one of the non-packaged
directories is particularly hard to grasp, anyway. It's just a
readjustment for people, now.
BTW, several years ago, before really starting with the package
management implementation, we discussed using a union FS and decided
against it. If you're interested, you can probably find that discussion
in the list archives.
CU, Ingo
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