The User-Accessible Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

The User-Accessible Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

Posted Apr 8, 2004 21:26 UTC (Thu) by strombrg (guest, #2178)
Parent article: The User-Accessible Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

How about leaving things in a user's home directory, but having a database of which apps are available in which users' directories? Then there's an app that queries the database, with options like "add this one app to my path" or "add all apps installed by user xyz to my path". The option to "add all apps installed by any user to my path" might need to not be implemented, or perhaps be site configurable.

Also, it'd be really nifty if software could get its libraries and config files relative to an environment variable (or perhaps more than one env var, with one being site specific and one being app specific, with the app one overriding the site one, but most software going at the site one). So much software has compiled in paths, making it so you can't move it around without recompiling. If it were relative to an env var, then you could package it once, and you could just as well put it in /opt, or the user's homedir, or /usr/local, or any other local convention people might have chosen. Of course you'd have to default to Something if the env vars aren't set, or maybe error out.

Dan Stromberg, strombrg@dcs.nac.uci.edu

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