Being that Ubuntu is “linux for everyone”, I really like the idea of doing away with the FHS layout.
I mean how many forum users have absolutely no clue what /etc is? I can’t explain that some unix guy way back when named it that instead of /Configuration Files. It just sounds backwards.
I know gobolinux is fighting against it, but I am surprised I don’t read more about it. Good to see OSNews covered it today, maybe it will give people more awareness of ‘hey, now that it’s 2008 this is really frickin stupid’.
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#1 by Michael on August 19, 2008 - 12:03 am
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Ah, poo. I had a whole comment typed and didn’t answer the question, and it got eaten
I’ll try again.
The current FHS needs a change if Linux ever wants to become a dominant OS. Even finding documentation is hard. I’ve been using Linux for a few years now, and still had to hunt for awhile to find a folder I knew was called “docs”. Finally I found it under /usr/share/docs, but I know I’ll forget that in a day or two. I don’t use documentation enough to put that location to memory, and it’s not obvious enough to make it easy to find.
The system seriously needs a change. The only benefit to it right now is that it scares people who don’t know what they’re doing far away from any folders that might have system-critical files. The problem is that it’s far too entrenched to make it an easy transfer. That and you’ll never have everyone on board, and this is a move that could divide the entire Linux community right down the middle.
#2 by Anonymous on August 19, 2008 - 1:27 am
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The thing is if Ubuntu does that Vendors go bye bye. People have enough trouble supporting Linux flavors due to all the different changes between the distros. While I think this is a good point we still need vendor support.
#3 by Aleksey on August 19, 2008 - 2:04 am
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AFAIK, Mac OS X has part if not most of the old layout, but it hides it from the user. I think a good compromise would be to put symlinks to the folders with more logical names and have an option in the file manager to show/hide the real layout.
#4 by David Adam on August 19, 2008 - 2:40 am
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Windows Vista does the same sort of thing as OS X to move the atrocious name ‘C:\Documents and Settings’ to ‘C:\Users’ transparently – old programs continue to work but to average users everything is more logically stored in a Users directory.
#5 by maxauthority on August 19, 2008 - 3:36 am
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For me it might be ok to change the thing to /config but using /Configuration Files/ (uppercase AND even with a space!) is just plain silly, especially since advanced users which edit things there will probably do it over the commandline, and novice users should NEVER have the need to do anything there.
#6 by Jonas on August 19, 2008 - 4:33 am
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Honestly, why would it be necessary to change the FS layout? IMO, users should not need to know how anything outside of their home directory is organized. If they want to they can learn, but it shouldn’t be needed to just use the computer.
Right now, sometimes you do need to know the location of some stuff in say /etc but it seems to me that it would be more productive to make those cases even rarer.
#7 by oliver on August 19, 2008 - 5:56 am
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[Grrr... I _did_ answer the math question and it ate my comment anyway, and make FF3 loose the comment when going back ... "hey, now that it’s 2008 this is really frickin stupid" indeed... well here's the short version of my comment]
[wow, looks like this page is even crappier than I thought: it requires _cookies_ for the captcha... ouch...]
- FHS might be bad but IMHO isn’t _that_ bad to warrant spending much time on a huge change
- as Jonas said: better make it unnecessary to edit files in /etc
- also Windows Registry shows that people do accept cryptic paths for editing obscure settings
- regarding /usr/share/doc/: better make the documentation available in some GUI app, like Yelp or Devhelp; make the copyright and changelog files available in the app’s About box or in gnome-app-installer
#8 by Herman Bos on August 19, 2008 - 6:58 am
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Not following the FHS would be very sad.
If you just read it once its very obvious. The people who complain about it never read it and just start searching without a clue.
Ofcourse there are some exceptions which might be a little less obvious but still easy to find.
Normal users can just use some cute frontend.
The powerusers or administrator should be able to remember a few directories. Its lovely that FHS is more or less commonly used. Basicly you can find everything on any distro even if your not familar with it.
If Ubuntu would dump the FHS I and many others will get furiously angry.
#9 by Phil on August 19, 2008 - 7:39 am
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I had a go at a new hierarchy a few years back, and it seemed back then that no one was very interested. Today generally things are a whole lot easier, and yet suddenly people are talking about it again!
Anyway, my idea went something like:
* create a new distro structure
* describe it as “X using GNU/Linux Technology”, i.e. not “a Linux distro”
* freely release standards to be _strictly_ followed for anyone who wants to be allowed to say “X compatible”
* live happily ever after
The trouble of course is that back in the day there was no one who could really exert that sort of influence, and the whole thing would end up on its own and incompatible. Have things really changed enough by now? Is Ubuntu big enough to be something that different? I have no idea. Anyway, nascent file tree follows:
http://undeconstructed.googlepages.com/tree.html
Oh, I should mention that I wouldn’t want to see other distros encourage to be “Ubuntu compatible”, there would need to be a neutral designation, with which all distros, including Ubuntu were aligned.
#10 by Jeff Schroeder on August 19, 2008 - 8:16 am
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Hey, it is 2008, *your* idea is really stupid. The FHS is one of the best things Linux has going for it.
Take a look at the other Unix “competitors”:
- Solaris: /usr/ucb and a zillion character $PATH to do anything useful
- HP-UX: /etc/ping… seriously wtf?
- AIX: Do we really need to go there?
Just because people don’t understand it does not mean we should cripple something that has worked for decades because of them. Your ideas are normally great Steven, but this does not fall into that category.
-Not and Anonymous COward
#11 by admin on August 19, 2008 - 9:24 am
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The target for this change isn’t me, as I understand FHS explicitly (I have been running linux well over a decade now).
My point was, when I talk to someone in the office, I just can’t, with good conscience, explain the file system to them without sounding like I am explaining some relic of the past.
And those of us who do understand it no doubt have the learning ability to adapt to whatever changes may come. Not everyone is lucky enough to have that skill, so in this scenario I am totally willing to adapt where others can’t.
At the same time Jeff, I appreciate your blunt honesty, and maybe it isn’t the best way. I just happen to run into FHS questions from people far more often than I would like.
#12 by Stoffe on August 19, 2008 - 9:38 am
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Instead, all times when an end user needs to be told about something in /etc should be treated as a bug and fixed.
#13 by Vadim P. on August 19, 2008 - 9:55 am
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This is the dumbest issue ever.
No user cares what /etc is. All they care, and they know, that /home is theirs. The rest is “the computers”.
#14 by Ryan on August 19, 2008 - 10:22 am
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Others have hit the nail on the head.
The filesystem layout shouldn’t matter to the user if they never have to go into it. Take a look at OS X. I mean *really* take a look (use the command line). It has a filesystem layout that is just as complex, if not more complex, than Linux. Why doesn’t it matter?
File system layout doesn’t matter on OS X because Apple is tacking the right problem! Hide the ugly filesystem from the user. If you are making users hunt for files in the underlying filesystem to configure something, you are doing it wrong!
As other have also mentioned, deviating from the FHS means losing vendor support. It is hard enough to have cross-distro support without having to worry about some distro completely changing up the filesystem.
#15 by Robin on August 19, 2008 - 10:30 am
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I find it much more important that the whole dot files and directories directly in your home directory go away. Every program should use the XDG Base Directory Specification (http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html), where the configuration files are in ~/.config/. I already have 19 files in it (versus 138 directly in ~/), so its usage seems to be growing.
#16 by Jonas on August 19, 2008 - 10:56 am
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“My point was, when I talk to someone in the office, I just can’t, with good conscience, explain the file system to them without sounding like I am explaining some relic of the past.”
The real issue is: why should you need to explain it in the first place? And to who? Who is the target audience for this change?
Certainly not sysadmins. They know or is capable of understanding the structure.
Users in an office situation shouldn’t, for that matter, have rights to modify/add stuff in /etc, /sbin or anywhere outside of ~ in the first place.
And if there is a situation when they need to modify stuff in /etc, I don’t think the names of the directories would be the biggest hurdle. It would be guiding them into using a console in temporarily granting them the rights to modify whatever it is they need to modify. Ideally a system should be so efficiently set up that a sysadmin could set the user-shell to /bin/false and remove the ability for the user to use nautilus/konqueror or whatever to browse out of ~.
It’s a bit different for home users since they usually already have the root-password (or the distro uses sudo, like Ubuntu, so they only need to know their own password). Still, for those situations it doesn’t solve the root issue: that manually modifying settings files should never be needed and should be treated as a bug. And NOT by introducing a change that could potentially break things.
FWIW, is there really a difference between Linux and Windows, for example, here? A Linux user normally doesn’t have write access to /etc or the ability to introduce binaries into /sbin or /lib. A Windows users, on the other hand, shouldn’t have those rights to the registry or %SYSTEMROOT%/System32. And in both cases, the end-user shouldn’t need to know the directories exist in the first place.
What I’m trying, in a rather long-winded way, to say is that this is a solution in need of a problem. The real issue is to make sure that everything, whether it needs root-access or not, can be configured without knowing how Linux and FHS works in detail.
#17 by Asa on August 19, 2008 - 3:18 pm
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Why do people keep bringing up the argument that we should break Ubuntu’s ability to install generic 3rd party linux software to gain the convenience of easy path names for new users? Gobolinux is doing it but afik you can’t just download the package for vmware (or any other generic 3rd party package) and install it because all of the paths are wrong. It has to be repackaged for gobolinux.
#18 by Dave on August 19, 2008 - 3:48 pm
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I don’t see any problems with it:
The worst thing would be to have a half-arsed situation (*cough Apple*) where some programs are in one place i.e /Applications, and some are in another (/usr/bin). Talking of which I think the folder layout makes sense, and I could probably justify every folder if challenged, with the exception to the naming of “etc” and “opt”.
It would take be near impossible to get a situation where everything has moved to a new structure.
Besides, all I as a user ever enter is “/home” , “/etc” and /var/www. My opinion is that it maybe makes sense for nautilus/dolphin to hide the rest. and possibly make a symlink to /etc with a clearer name. Without any need to change something that isn’t broken.
#19 by Dave on August 19, 2008 - 3:50 pm
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Edit: I don’t see why we have both /mnt and /media.
Especially with automount programs putting everything in /media.
Perhaps Ubuntu should get rid of /mnt on a default install, I can’t see that breaking anything, and we’ll be 1 step closer to your goal.