gentoo - wow!! - progress

[dep]

begin  Collins's  quote:

| What, exactly, are the benefits to be gained from enforcing the
| fhs?

consistency, so that there is a meaning to the word "linux" beyond the 
kernel.

| gentoo has a mature interpretation of the fhs (there are
| nothing but interpretations at present), installs in a very
| standard fashion from tarballs, and it's very easy to introduce
| tarballs that haven't been massaged by gentoo into the structure
| without breaking anything.

gentoo does not have a mature interpretation of anything except 
gentoo. gentoo and the fhs are chalk and cheese. and the "everybody 
else does it, too" defense is no defense at all, for obvious reasons 
and because it's simply not true: *nobody* else puts packages in 
/usr/[packagename]. that is not interpreting the fhs; it's flinging 
down and dancing on it.

| You keep metioning "screw around with the system."  The beauty of
| the current gentoo structure is the structure.

in which case it is devoid of beauty, because it has taken a flyer off 
in some weird and utterly unnecessary direction. there is simply no 
reason to reinvent the wheel, especially when in so doing it becomes 
incompatible with wheels of the round variety. gentoo could just as 
easily have been fhs compliant; they just decided not to. 

| If you make even a
| minimal effort to understand the structure, you can screw around
| with the system to your heart's content without breaking anything. 
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how dropping kde
| software into /usr/kde/2/... or /usr/kde/3/... makes your system
| any better than a system with kde in /opt/kde/2/... or
| /opt/kde/3/...  

it doesn't make it better. it makes it worse. far worse. 

| With gentoo, I don't need to subscribe to red
| carpet or anthing else to maintain my system.  The tools are built
| in, and my hard drive isn't a battle ground.

no. but it's not the residence of a linux system, either -- it's the 
residence of a gentoo system that employs linux software.

| Linux is fragmented in ways that even the new religion of fhs can't
| fix.  

the fhs has been around linux, i daresay, longer than you have.

| You need only think about the competing desktops and the
| scads of products that are bound to specific levels of library
| support.  I submit that if you could wave your magic wand, convert
| all distros to the same fhs file structure, etc., the fragmentation
| would not disappear.

your submission, duly noted, is wrong.

| Linux is and always will be about choices,
| and I doubt that linux will ever become the M$ monolith.

it certainly won't. it will, at the current rate, be fragmented away 
into oblivion, because people pay no attention to even a minimal set 
of standards and even argue that there shouldn't be any. which opens 
up room for standards to be dictated. which will be done by the big 
dog. you know what would be necessary to wipe linux out? microsoft 
cutting a deal with red hat to endorse palladium. game, set, match. 
tcp/ip utterly blown away. and as it stands, without strict adherence 
to standards, there is nothing that all the rest of linux, which 
combined does not have the installed base that red hat has, could do 
about it. and this poop about linux being about choices -- nonsense. 
linux offers choices in a number of categories. but without a minimal 
set of standards linux is about nothing except the disappearance of 
all but red hat linux, as well as a couple of novelty distributions, 
such as gentoo.

| So, my hard drive will melt into the ground and I won't be able to
| install one of the new blessed-by-you fhs distributions if I
| choose? <grin>  I don't think so.

i do not know what will happen to your hard drive, but you won't be 
able to install a linux distribution other than red hat if there 
aren't any out there. which is a very distinct possibility. well, 
there will always be debian, i suppose, but that's about it. 
distributions have been so busy trying to screw each other out of the 
tiny piece of the pie that they have that they've utterly lost track 
of the much bigger portion of the whole pie that would be available 
to them if they'd stop their fratricide and concentrate on it. red 
hat's 90 percent of linux is but a small percentage of the possible 
market. but without standards we'd frankly better hope that red hat 
succeeds in blowing everyone else out of the water in the linux world 
(which they have largely already done) because otherwise linux will 
die a suicide.
-- 
dep

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