Hi Adrien,
Am 03.09.2015 um 12:48 schrieb Adrien Destugues:
... sorry for replying to myself. Just wanted to add, and this has been
mentioned before, that a
lot of people including myself thought that both the packages and non-packaged
folders would
contribute to a /single/ directory layout.
I regret that it wasn't done, but
I understand the reasons. However, that difference would have been more
intuitive
I'm not sure about that. The fact that the writes would be somehow
"overlaid" over the packages can lead to confusing situations. What
if you try to backup your install? Should you copy only the packages?
Should you copy the mounted contents, and if you do so, how do you
restore the install from the backups?
I don't think that would be intuitive at all. Everyone can understand
what a read-only directory is. Understanding an overlay system with
two layers is not as easy, and doesn't qualify as "intuitive". We
have an example of overlaying writable and non-writable directories,
in the form of the DeskBar menu. It is definitely one of the most
confusing parts of the whole system (2 directories of which one is
packaged, a file to bind them together that Tracker and DeskBar
pretend is a directory, but which you can't access as one in
Terminal, uncertain priorities (what if you want to replace a file)
and strange limitations (no way to delete a file from the packaged
dir)). And using it in a global way would raise some other questions,
such as what happens when a package update
replaces/creates/deletes/moves a file that you modified.
/and/ would have
avoided a lot of compatibility issues some of which are still present.
Do you have a list of compatibility issues? I think we have solved
most of them already. I can think of only one problem, which is that
the user non-packaged directories are not seen by apps using the
FindDirectory API (the packaged dirs are seen, and
system/non-packaged is mapped to the old "common" directory, IIRC).
We have introduced BPathFinder to make the API more flexible and
avoid this in the future.
Are there other problems left?