Re: Proposal question.

[Tim Harrison]

Christian Edward Gruber wrote:

> I found the proposal quite good.  Frankly, I see no drastic reason to depart
> from the Apple current filesystem, hosted on GNUSTEP_ROOT, which (with minor
> nits) is what I see as the gist of this proposal.

Yes.  I did my best to compare and contrast, making concessions for some 
parts of GNUstep (for example, not having everything as frameworks).

> I would really prefer to see GNUStep use this layout consistently.

I think it would make understanding the layout, and even how to use 
GNUstep, a whole lot easier.

> The only thing I'd be interested in is having $(HOME)/.GNUstep, instead of
> $(HOME)/GNUstep.  It's more consistent with $(HOME)/.OpenStep, which keeps a
> hidden directory.

I can't recall if I'd mentioned that I'd added the Users domain to the 
proposal or not.  If so, apologies.  If not, you can view the updates at
http://www.linuxstep.org/documentation/GNUstepFH.html.

One of the things I found odd about the Users domain was that it was the 
only of the four that broke from the $(DOMAIN)/[structure] format. 
Having, for example, /home/harrison/GNUstep/[Library|etc...] was odd, in 
comparison to $((USER_DOMAIN)=/home/$(username))/[Library|etc...].

In this case, the only two directories (based on my proposal) that would 
be added to the user's home directory would be ~/Library and ~/Tools, 
with the structure under that being similar to the other domains.

Now, if people don't want to add extra visible directories to their home 
dirs, I can understand that.  Under LinuxSTEP, those directories exist 
anyway, so there's no harm.  Maybe that's a bit of my LinuxSTEP FH 
design sneaking in.  However, in an integrated system, I don't see why 
there has to be a ~/GNUstep directory, or even a ~/.GNUstep directory. 
It becomes an unnecessary namespace, in relation to the other domains. 
Plus, why do Library and Tools have to be hidden from the user?  Maybe 
they want to be able to easily see the contents of those parts of the 
structure?

The one thing that I could see being a problem is WindowMaker. 
WindowMaker creates a ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker directory.  I'm not 
sure if that's configurable when building it from source (and definitely 
not if you're installing with RPM or apt, I'm almost positive). 
However, I don't see any integration between GNUstep and WindowMaker at 
all, so no functionality is lost.  If WindowMaker uses ~/GNUstep, just 
because GNUstep does, maybe a change in structure on our side would 
convince them to aim our way?

These are just thoughts that I kicked around when writing the Users 
domain explanation.  The more comments, the clearer it could be made.


--

Tim Harrison
tim@linuxstep.org
http://www.linuxstep.org/