Re: Customizable filesystem support for GNUstep

[oberhage]

Helge Hess <helge.hess@opengroupware.org> wrote:
: On Feb 16, 2007, at 18:45, Stefan Bidigaray wrote:
:> So in the Mac there's no such thing as a Local domain?  I guess I  
:> can see why from a usability stand point.

: It has, its the directories living in the root. The System libs are  
: in the system subdir, eg:
: /Library      => Local
: /System/Library       => System

: A bit unusual, but IMHO makes sense ;-)

Only as long as the user(!)-root home-directory is not '/', so that it
is separated from ~root/Library. With the above choice, problems can be
imminent.

If memory serves me right, Apple has put "root's" homedirectory into
/var (/var/root), where /var is a symlink to /private/var; for me this
contradicts the Unix-rule of always putting "root's" homedirectory in
the 'root-filesystem', while /var is an 'official possible mountpoint'
in that filesystem-layout. On the other hand I don't know if "/private"
(NeXT's invention) is allowed to be a mounted partition or has to
always reside in the root-filesystem. The intention of NeXT was to have
all files, that make up the 'personality' of a machine in a separate
filesystem (that has to be writeable!), thus '/private'; this also
suggests, that it should be (allowed to be) mountable, thus a 'non-root
filesystem'. But as /etc lives in /private, too (via symlink) ...

So either '/LocalLibrary' (as on NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP) or '/Local/Library'
would not only be a less unusual, but really better choice in my eyes,
to avoid namespace-conflicts. But since it is Apple's proprietary system,
it's their choice, of course. For GNUstep, that shouldn't be mimicked.
I do hope, we're not running into that danger :-).

Greetings,
 Ruediger