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I personally think its time to rename the directories to something more readable. But FHS shows no willingness to do so. Which I dont mind at all, that's their thing. Whatever.
I think /etc/ should be named /config/
And a root /logging/ directory should exist.
Mnt? really? Can't be bothered to spell out 'Mount'?
We are really past the days where our space is limited, and filenames can be more than 8 characters. so why not utilize 'words' instead of 'abbreviations and abstractions.'
I like it.
Last edited by szboardstretcher; 03-06-2014 at 09:59 AM.
... FHS shows no willingness to do so. Which I dont mind at all, that's their thing. ...
I guess as soon as these are renamed accordingly, people must move from the keyboard to the mouse. Whether this is more harmful to the carpal tunnel cannot be decided by the FHS -- maybe WHO instead.
Unix is not just a functional implementation of POSIX. More important than that, it is a culture and a language and a heritage. It has humanity. It has continuity. If you reject the vocabulary, then you also reject the culture, and the people that participate in the culture, and their accumulated experience. If you're going to do that successfully, well, you need to be as powerful as Apple. GoboLinux is not as powerful as Apple.
I see GoboLinux supports "English | Português | Deutsch | Русском | Magyar | Français | Español | Svenska | Italiano | 日本語 | Türkçe | Norsk". Maybe they should support a project with similar aims, by throwing all those out and replacing them with Volapük.
But when a car company comes up with a new system, called say "Battery based Blinker fluid injector system" they don't shoe horn it into a previous term just because there is a culture surrounding previous car terms.
If everyone continued doing everything for culture/historic/nostalgia related reasons, we would still be in the stone ages.
But im done here. Im not going to have an opinion argument over 'directory names' when I just now realized that I really and truly don't care one way or another.
At the end of the day, I will make symlinks to the old directory names for easier reading anyway.
Greetz
Several years ago I met a software developer from Brazil who told me that due to quirks in language, specifically for him, Portuguese, that many Brazilians used English as if it was part of an icon because it was just shorter and simpler. I don't know how much he was qualified to speak for large groups but I think the basic concept is sound and complies with KISS. Why spell out "mount" when everyone knows what "mnt" means? As was pointed out, even if you are a wiz with the tab key, there is still great advantage to keeping terms short.
Much more importantly, as soon as you change directory structure and/or naming conventions you immediately break everything that has gone before and to what advantage? This is my major complaint about distros with auto-dependency resolving. They are forced to restructure to do what they've added on while avoiding conflicts and this breaks compatibility and fragments Linux. Add to this, some restructure exactly in order to break compatibility to isolate themselves in hopes of becoming some de facto standard, the precursor to proprietary. I find this incredibly selfish and short-sighted.
One of the greatest strengths of *Nix is compliance with standards that insures not only the ability to accumulate skills (instead of reinventing the wheel and tossing all your hard work in the trash bin) but also The Community. The more that distros create arbitrary change the more fragmented Linux becomes and the size of communities that "speak the same language and dialect" dwindles.
But when a car company comes up with a new system, called say "Battery based Blinker fluid injector system" they don't shoe horn it into a previous term just because there is a culture surrounding previous car terms.
Where do you think the word 'car' comes from?
Quote:
Originally Posted by szboardstretcher
If everyone continued doing everything for culture/historic/nostalgia related reasons, we would still be in the stone ages.
Amongst other things, I do prehistoric archaeology (Neolithic and Bronze Age). Their culture progressed in incremental changes that were sometimes large and sometimes small. So does Unix.
Quote:
Originally Posted by szboardstretcher
ln -s /usr/ where_all_the_heroin_is_stored
I once snapshotted a load of developers' files from /gprs to /goats_piss_really_slowly -- it took them weeks to notice.
Amongst other things, I do prehistoric archaeology (Neolithic and Bronze Age). Their culture progressed in incremental changes that were sometimes large and sometimes small.
Where do you do this? Do you get to travel a lot? I think that's an awesome sounding profession. Or is it a hobby?
Greetz
Several years ago I met a software developer from Brazil who told me that due to quirks in language, specifically for him, Portuguese, that many Brazilians used English as if it was part of an icon because it was just shorter and simpler. I don't know how much he was qualified to speak for large groups but I think the basic concept is sound and complies with KISS. Why spell out "mount" when everyone knows what "mnt" means? As was pointed out, even if you are a wiz with the tab key, there is still great advantage to keeping terms short.
Much more importantly, as soon as you change directory structure and/or naming conventions you immediately break everything that has gone before and to what advantage? This is my major complaint about distros with auto-dependency resolving. They are forced to restructure to do what they've added on while avoiding conflicts and this breaks compatibility and fragments Linux. Add to this, some restructure exactly in order to break compatibility to isolate themselves in hopes of becoming some de facto standard, the precursor to proprietary. I find this incredibly selfish and short-sighted.
One of the greatest strengths of *Nix is compliance with standards that insures not only the ability to accumulate skills (instead of reinventing the wheel and tossing all your hard work in the trash bin) but also The Community. The more that distros create arbitrary change the more fragmented Linux becomes and the size of communities that "speak the same language and dialect" dwindles.
IMHO that is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
You only know "mnt" stands for "mount" once you learnt it. Just think about "/usr", for example, it is often misunderstood as "user" but it actually stands for "Unix System Resource". And, Gobo's way (lets call it this way) does not break anything. I am not saying I like it, I am just saying that it doesn't break compatibility.
Where do you do this? Do you get to travel a lot? I think that's an awesome sounding profession. Or is it a hobby?
Thanks, but we are just amateurs. I get to travel approx five miles http://csirm.wordpress.com/ and http://www.bingleyhistory.co.uk/cup_and_ring.html
We have circumstantial evidence that Bronze Age people were incorporating neolithic rock art into their burials, maybe a thousand years after the rocks were decorated. Some people think the rock art tradition even continued into the Iron Age. But over the same centuries tool technology and agriculture seems to have changed in sudden bursts. Some modern research indicates that there were hunter-gatherer communities and agricultural communities in the same place at the same time for hundreds of years. These were people who were modern in every way, except culturally. They were weird
Mnt? really? Can't be bothered to spell out 'Mount'?
A short glance at the words of UNIX ("mnt", "umount", "ls", "cp", "mv", "rm", "passwd", "mkfs", "fsck") should suffice to illustrate the fact that UNIX developers around the world are still struggling with the concept of vowels.
Well, filesystems are already represented in a virtual way and there's nothing to stop you from 'customizing' what is displayed -even without having to change underlying structures. Custom versions of file-managers/ls, etc could be made to show and use something different.
I've looked at gobo and earlier predecessors it was based on. All wind up with longer names and less-informative, less-useful name structures. As an aside, the current buzz around eliminating /bin, /sbin and /lib similarly accomplishes a less-useful, less-informative structure.
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