[RFC] User Accesable Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

[Doncho N. Gunchev]

On Sunday 28 March 2004 00:34, Gary L Greene Jr wrote:
> 
> This is a proposal for a standard to accommodate the accessibility of the
> filesystem by end-users. We request discussion on this as a new standard. The
> URL to get to the document is:
> 
> http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~abreschm/uafhs/
> 
> I am a member of the Ark Linux team, who is interested in seeing the Linux
> desktop become a viable option. I apologize for the cross-posting.
> 
    I really dislike all these hidden dotfiles/dotdirs in my home directory
and am happy to see someone is working on this. I was thinking it would be
better if we had ~/etc/bashrc instead of ~/.bashrc and so on, but I see much
more general ideas here, so here's what I think looking at it:

    Let's say we have program foo from package foo-1.0-1.sparc.rpm which has
a .desktop file in ~/.<distribution>/share/applications/foo.desktop.
--- cut ---
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+
| ~/.<distribution>/share/ | Architecture independent files used by programs |
|                          | in ~/.<distribution>/<architecture>/bin/        |
+--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
--- cut ---
    In this case if a user uses his home from a nfs share on ix86 mahine
he/she will see this application in his/her kde/gnome start menu, but will
not be able to run it (it is the sparc version, not the ix86). Another
problem could be shared files that are little-endian/big-endian dependent.
The space could be saved by hardlinking identical files which are not
suposed change without being removed first (/usr/share/doc/*/*).

    What about uafhs being configurable via /etc/uafhs? It could be something
like 'UAFHSBASE="$HOME/uafhs/$ARCH/$DIST-$DIST_VER"'. This way only a script
will be needed to setup this variable at login time and the install tools
should be made UAFHS-aware (or at least I hope so). The main idea is to allow
a user to login from same/different distribution(s) and architecture(s)
simultaneously. I have RH9 + FC1 with shared /home partition and this leads
to many problems with all .dot(files|dirs) in my home dir (kde for example)
even without logging in simultaneously.

ps: sorry for my english...

-- 
Regards,
  Doncho N. Gunchev    Registered Linux User #291323 at counter.li.org
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