On 13 Jun 2009, Lennart Poettering outgrape: > On Sat, 13.06.09 16:46, Nix (nix at esperi.org.uk) wrote: >> Personally, if something went wrong with PA I would never think of >> looking in ~/.config/, because the directory is plainly superfluous: >> dotfiles in $HOME *are* configuration, so there's no need for an extra >> layer of directories. As there's no way everything will ever switch to >> using ~/.config, all this does is adds an inconsistent place to keep >> config files: and Unix has been fairly free of such inconsistencies >> until now. [...] > Gah. If you ask me Unix is a complex system with many misdesigns and > limitations. It might be a bit less bad then many other systems, but > seriously, abstractions like the unix mantra of "everything is a file" > are just plain broken. My sound card is simply not a file, and people > who think that are smoking too much weird stuff. Agreed, a sound card is not a file: but the OS should endeavour to layer an abstraction over the *interfaces* to the sound card *such that it can be accessed via a file descriptor*. And PA does that: it has a network protocol that you can talk to it over. Congratulations, PA makes your sound card a file :) > Ther are some good ideas in Unix, but believing it was the holy grail > is crack. The 'everything is a file' part is critical, actually. I can think of exactly two times it's been seriously violated: SysVIPC and networking. The former was such a mess as a direct result that nobody uses it anymore: the latter's absence of /dev files for networking devices was less critical but still ugly. > I'd take "non-unixlike" as a compliment, not an insult, thank you very > much. It depends if you replace it with something as consistent as well as better. If what you produce doesn't get complete coverage you end up with a mess. (Thankfully Linux audio was already a mess: you can hardly make it *less* consistent.) > And in case you wondered, with stuff like policykit, consolekit and > stuff we are doing our best to make Linux less and less > Unix-like. I dunno. Most of those are improving the authentication systems, and Unix's standard authentication systems have always sucked so much that people have long tried to reinvent them (viz Kerberos). > And yes, we absolutely should move our stuff to the XDG dirs. Patches > welcome. What advantages do they have? What on earth possessed anyone to think that that extra layer of directories was a good idea? Right now it's just a pointless inconsistency: somewhere else I have to look for configuration. Great.
