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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: A radical idea
From:       Seth Nickell <snickell () stanford ! edu>
Date:       2001-11-13 22:11:11
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On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 13:53, Steffen Hein wrote:
> hmmm... I don't see the problem, really!
> Of course many people only know the windos file hierarchy, but unix' file
> hierarchy is much better and (in my opinion) simpler.
> 
> /bin - most important console programs

Why do I care about "console programs" ? And what defines them as
"important" or not important from a user perspective? On the console I
use "ssh" a lot more often than "mknod" or even "chgrp". Actually, I
find the distinction between /bin and /usr/bin to be fairly arbitrary
and mostly historical. All in all "/bin" is really "programs needed to
assemble a Linux system". Which seems fine for setup, but dumb to keep
around long term on real user systems.

> /sbin - root's toys ;)

What about /usr/sbin? What's the distinction there? And lots of the
things in /sbin are of interest to users besides root, if only to get
information (for example ifconfig). I would say these are administration
tools more than "root's toys". And once again, why should these be
seperated from other tools? Is mknod (or a number of other utilities in
/bin) really useful to non-root users?

> /usr/bin - console apps

More like "everything else". Which on most systems seems to mean "almost
everything". The granularity of these directories is only useful to a
small contingent of the user population - sys admins (maybe, I'd
actually argue its not) and those assembling systems from scratch.
Everyone else is stuck working out of a giant multi-thousand entry
directory (not that anyone cares, just use your path, but if you're
using that argument why does any of this need to be seperate?). Almost
all KDE and GNOME applications are installed in /usr/bin on Debian,
Mandrake and RedHat. Dunno about other distros.

> /usr/X11/bin - X11 apps

Like KDE, GNOME, and GNUstep applications? Oh wait, this is mostly just
"apps that came with the X11 distribution", a pretty arbitrary
distinction. How should I know whether what I'm looking for came with
X11 or whether it was a seperate util? (actually, its easy to tell, but
only because pure-Xlib stuff looks terribly archane).

> /etc - global configuration files - much better than the windoze registry!

Except there's no convention or common expectation as to file format or
where to find settings. Windows registry is a broken implementation of a
reasonably good concept. The one downside is you can't edit the settings
from a text file, but a good middle solution is to use XML config files.
/etc could be great if it was well organized with a common file format
(for example /usr/doc tends to be well organized, I *know* that I can
find docs for packageX in /usr/doc/packageX, which isn't /etc this way?
historical....)

> It's logical. People just have to read a book - not even that - You can
> explain the basic concept of the unix filesystem hierarchy on a single page,
> so there's no need to make things look "newbee friendly". They are already!

Bullshit. Filesystem should be so simple you don't have to learn it, and
I don't think its easy to explain to newbies either. Additionally, I
think the ordering is less than helpful, even for "advanced users".

-Seth

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