The File Hierarchy Standard (FHS), is a standard that define where the
files of a package should be placed in the root directory of the
systems. It probably did not change much since the beginning of Unix,
and it make files be placed where users, developers and administrators
expect them to be.
The main disadvantage of it, is making hard to have multiple active
versions of a package, because the likelihood of the multiple versions,
to have the same preferred place in the hierarchy for some files.
On other way of seeing this disadvantage, is the fact that in a system
using FHS, new versions of packages often break other programs...
because using FHS force you to erase the old package to put a new one in
it's place... so that programs that were dependent on the old version
cannot use the old version because it is not there anymore.
You probably only realize all this, when you use a distribution like
NixOS, that have let FHS go away, to make every binary package to be in
their own directory. This solve the problem of multiple active versions
of a package, and allows different packages to depend on different
versions of a package. This also allows normal users to install package,
just for them... or shared if many users install the same version of a
program.
Well... I was not so happy with NixOS. In part because binary packages
are considered, a cache version of a built packages. In the past, often
the binary cache was not having the built version of a package, and it
had to build it from sources... which is long, especially if you have an
older computer. I am unsure why this seems to be less problematic now
than in the past.
The other problem I had with NixOS, was the strange Nix syntax of
packages. That I did not seems to get it. Now... with time, the more I
am exposed to it, the less it seems strange. Still, I wanted a more
traditional Linux distribution. I had thought that the fact that Fedora
support modules, that it could be a bit like NixOS. Only recently, when
someone suggested that we could use modules to have different versions
of Python, avoiding the problem of new versions breaking old versions,
did I really realized that Fedora modules does not allow multiple active
versions of a module to be installed at the same time... so that Fedora
modules does not help much with the problem of new packages needing to
replace older versions, so breaking packages that were dependent on old
versions.
To be clear, the fact to be able to have multiple versions does not
means that NixOS have many different versions for each packages. For
some reasons, they try as much as possible to keep just one version of
each package... but while upgrading... they may keep the older version a
while. This reduce friction with other packages.
Now like I said, Nix use a very different syntax and tools for defining
packages. But I don't think you have to adopt it to have most of the
advantages of Nix. And I believe it would be possible to keep the
current use of .spec files in such a way of doing things.
That said, I realize that what I am proposing, is more like a fork of
Fedora, than a proposed change, as letting FHS is such a big change. And
I am, sadly, not really suggesting that I want to begin such a endeavor.
For me, it probably means I will begin to move to using more NixOS than
Fedora. But I had the feeling that it could be useful for Fedora, to
realize, and evaluate the price they pay for using the File Hierarchy
Standard.
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