Gobo Linux

thebman

Anyone here tried this?

Seems like a good idea.

GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy.
In GoboLinux you don't need a package database because the filesystem is the database: each program resides in its own directory, such as /Programs/Xorg-Lib/7.4 and /Programs/KDE-Libs/4.2.0. Like it? Learn more...

http://gobolinux.org/

My issue with most Linux distro's is they are all very similar. I like this idea. I was thinking of installing it. I have it burned already to a CD but left it in work

kierank01

There has been a lot of work done to make the filesystem hierarchy standardised, and a lot of problems are caused by distros not following the standard.

Maybe gobo has its place, but I like the way that you can apply a fix that works for ubuntu, and will probably work for mint or archlinux.

bman

What's the benefits of this file system over the standard Linux file system structure? I'm not sure what (if anything) this distro achieves.

Tillotson

I tried it in virtualbox a few months ago.

There aren't that many packages / recipes available which is to be expected. I used it for a few days, but I don't like KDE and when I tried to install xmonad (DWM wasn't available) there was some sort of error when symlinking. Next boot failed and I gave up on it. I don't know how common this experience is but I'd try it out in a virtual machine before I jumped.

I don't know where the users hang out but the forum looks kinda dead. Also having a good wiki is important to me.

It's a neat idea and I'd try again if someone came back and said that it was now stable.

thebman

Well they say:

The GoboLinux system layout seems to be a major departure from the Unix tradition. Does this mean all programs need to adjusted so that they work with the new layout? Fortunately, the answer is no. Through a mapping of traditional paths into their GoboLinux counterparts, we transparently retain compatibility with the Unix legacy.

There is no rocket science to this: /bin is a link to /System/Links/Executables. And as a matter of fact, so is /usr/bin. And /usr/sbin... all "binaries" directories map to the same place. Amusingly, this makes us even more compatible than some more standard-looking distributions. In GoboLinux, all standard paths work for all files, while other distros may struggle with incompatibilites such as scripts breaking when they refer to /usr/bin/foo when the file is actually in /usr/local/bin/foo.

//removed example

You may have noticed that the Unix paths did not show up in the system root listing in the very first example. They are actually there, but they are concealed from view using the GoboHide kernel extension. This is for aesthetic purposes only and purely optional, though: GoboLinux does not require modifications in the kernel or any other system components. But our users seem to like it a lot. :-)

So theoretically I guess compatibility shouldn't be a problem.

Pygmalion

thebman wrote: »

There is no rocket science to this: /bin is a link to /System/Links/Executables. And as a matter of fact, so is /usr/bin. And /usr/sbin... all "binaries" directories map to the same place. Amusingly, this makes us even more compatible than some more standard-looking distributions. In GoboLinux, all standard paths work for all files, while other distros may struggle with incompatibilites such as scripts breaking when they refer to /usr/bin/foo when the file is actually in /usr/local/bin/foo.

Surely a script shouldn't be calling "/usr/bin/foo" or "/usr/local/bin/foo" anyway, it should just be calling "foo", which would be searched for in all the directories in $PATH?
Maybe I'm wrong or there's a need/want to use absolute paths but I can't see why that would be the case.

Also how would something like ccache work with this?
The way it's set up (for me at least, maybe there are other ways) is by prepending "/usr/lib/ccache/bin" to $PATH, this folder contains executables called "g++", "gcc", etc., which are called when you try to compile something as they're the first "g++" or "gcc" in the path.
I imagine with GoboLinux this wouldn't be possible as all executables are in the same directory, you could use aliases or something to achieve the effect but this would only work if called from that shell, not sure if it'd work for makefiles, calls from other programs, or if you tried to run a non-bash script in bash for example.

Seems like change for the sake of change instead of for the sake of improvement to be honest, "Oh look our paths are more easily readable therefore we're better and innovative".

Mathiasb

I can't see any reason for this at all.

pickarooney

Pygmalion wrote: »

Surely a script shouldn't be calling "/usr/bin/foo" or "/usr/local/bin/foo" anyway, it should just be calling "foo", which would be searched for in all the directories in $PATH?
Maybe I'm wrong or there's a need/want to use absolute paths but I can't see why that would be the case.

I often have several executables with the same name in different parts of my system. For example I have a skype wrapper script which loads some environmental variables and launches /usr/bin/skype. If I didn't specify the path I would forkbomb my machine by calling the wrapper script iteratively.
I could just call the script something else but then the various shortcuts wouldn't call the right executable and it's pain to update those one by one all the time.

I'm not sure I can see any advantage to this revised file structure though. I also don't see how it effectively manages shared resources.