Hacker News Reader

Comment by JNRowe | Hacker News Reader

For people -- admittedly, like me -- who have a strong knee-jerk reaction to GoboLinux's design the twenty year old "I am not clueless"¹ document contains a fair amount of interesting background and reasoning on the concepts. I don't think I've overcome the reaction entirely, but it isn't so strong anymore ;)

¹ https://gobolinux.org/doc/articles/clueless.html

View on HN

The writing has some of the same feel as the writing for HTMX or Tailwind.

Paraphrasing: "Yes we know this is different. Yes it is very simple. You may not be used to it, but it is easier to understand and work with. You don't have to use this. We like this and we are happy."

From the linked article:

> make all programs relocatable - I would love to see that, but that would either mean: rewrite every app in the world to use `libprefix`

I’m curious about what they mean by `libprefix`. A web search doesn’t turn up any useful results.

https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_SHARED_LI...

...?

I can't help but wonder how much of the kneejerk reaction is due to "cosmetic" parts of the design rather than the functional parts. For example, I notice that a lot of my initial reaction is based on the capitalization; "Programs" with a capital "P" (probably unfairly) evokes an emotional response due to reminding me of the Windows "Program Files" naming, and (perhaps slightly more fairly) I'd probably find it mildly infuriating to type "LibX11" rather than "libx11". Even though Linux filesystems are generally case insensitive, I imagine that package names would still be unique across casing, and it seems pretty likely that a Linux distribution focused on making the filesystem hierarchy more user-friendly wouldn't end up putting a second directory on the root that differs only by case. As silly as it is to verbalize, I genuinely think my initial reaction would be less strong if the naming convention examples were "/packages/libx11/1.6.9" and "/packages/gcc/9.2.0", and I don't think the benefits would be diminished at all by naming things like this.

> Even though Linux filesystems are generally case insensitive

Linux filesystems are generally case sensitive.

Oops, you're right, I always mix up the terms for those; I did mean sensitive though, which I hope was possible to figure out from what I said after.

I didn't even notice. My brain went directly for the correct meaning.

It would be helpful to update your comment.

Your brain is case insensiteve :)

It's a positive in my view, sorting by characters actually yields a difference between what is a directory and isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com