gentoo - wow!! - progress

[dep]

begin  Collins's  quote:

| Also, one remaining point.  I thought Redhat was complient, since
| the FHS seems to have adopted almost intact the Redhant filesystem
| and maintenance (RPM) structure.  Care to expand on the
| differences?

well, yeah, to the extent that i can. as i understand the history of 
the thing -- and if others who know more or know more surely than i 
do have corrections, please jump in -- the fhs as a document came to 
linux at a time when there was some forking. debian and slackware 
were looking at one fhs, while rpm-based distributions had another. 
(debian has been moving toward fhs compliance, but i do not know if 
they're there yet; slackware seems embroiled in a forever system v 
vs. bsd structure -- this having chiefly to do with init scripts -- 
but in that regard is unlikely ever to become fully compliant.) the 
fhs settled on system v and other rpm-ish things (though 
distributions were all over the place in this and in some cases are 
only now sort of coming into compliance), but did not utterly go with 
red hat.

obviously, some standards are better than other standards, but in the 
case of emerging technologies such as linux, any standard is better 
than no standard (with the possible exception of adoption of a 
lindows way of doing things, which in my estimation is just 
reprehensible). indeed, absent standards the big dog wins, and the 
big dog is red hat, which can certainly dictate standards for linux 
as surely as microsoft can dictate standards for everyone. which is 
at bottom why the unitedlinux thing so rankles: had they brought the 
community in on their standards-based work, they might have stood a 
chance of actual leverage. but by going about it as they have, 
they've lost that and are put-put-putting into oblivion. a zillion 
motivated linux users can be a powerful force, but not if they're 
told they're superfluous. i don't care what happens to unitedlinux, 
but i do weep over the missed opportunity to really establish 
standards-based linux.
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the 
envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.