Re: GNUstep directory layout

[Tim Harrison]

Pascal Bourguignon wrote:

> But you  can imagine easily  more sophisticated systems needing  to do
> things such as creating passwd/group entries, inserting crontab, inetd
> or inittab entries,  or setting things up to load  a kernel module now
> and at  boot time, etc.   An alternative could  be to do this  kind of
> stuff from within the application, but it seems to me that's better to
> do it  from an Installer.app  run once by  root rather than  by random
> users launching the application.

Not to look too much like I'm tooting a horn here, but check out the 
LinuxSTEP Package Manager (http://developer.linuxstep.org/downloads/). 
I like to think that Eric has addressed a lot of issues like this, even 
at this early stage of LSPM's development.

On of the nifty features is the ability to specify where logging and 
package databases reside.  This would allow one to edit the 
configuration, and specify a location within the root directory, if one 
wanted to have the package db available in single user mode.

The difference between just copying an application bundle somewhere and 
deleting it to remove something and installing with a package manager is 
simply that:  package management.  I can type "rm bash" as root, and 
remove the bash binary.  But, if I'm using a package manager, the 
package manager does the work of removing everything that was installed 
with bash, and cleaning the system up, leaving no trace of the installed 
bash package.  This is the benefit of package management.  The detriment 
is that most package managers are bad with dependencies and lack 
flexibility.

I don't know if this is helpful to the conversation, but I thought I'd 
give it a go, and see what everyone thought.

--

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