Re: non-flattened filesystem layout

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,


On 25/06/2016 09:49, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> I finally got round to committing the changes to the non-flattened directory 
> layout that I emailed about a few weeks ago.
>
> The move to seamless Debian multi-arch compatibility is very much a work in 
> progress, but even so I'd be grateful if people who habitually hack on gnustep 
> would switch to using the non-flattened layout and provide bug reports.
>
> Many years ago, the non-flattened layout was the only option, but we moved away 
> from it because we thought the added complexity was discouraging people from 
> using GNUstep.  That was probably true, but now that 64bit machines are 
> commonplace, its a lot more usual to see different library directories etc, and 
> maybe we could aim to switch the default back to non-flattened at some point.

I actually wonder what gain it would be. At most, on a single machine, 
I'd have 32bit and 64bit architectures. And even then, I guess it is 
more interesting for Frameworks and Bundles that could be used by both, 
but eventually one chooses to have an application built as either one or 
the other.

I see non-flattened something for binary distribution, a heritage from 
NeXT days where /Network was much used. On shared stuff one needs 
multi-arch, but on a single machine?

> But symbolic links don't work on windows XP (except NTFS with an add-on tool 
> apparently) or FAT filesystems at all.  Could we drop support for XP and for 
> building/installing on the old filesystem?  Or would we want to do something 
> like copy all the binaries?

I would rather not. Although Win7 is more widespread, WinXP is used in a 
lot of places (like VMs) and especially its server pendant is used, I'd 
rather support FAT and not depend on NTFS.
I myself build GNUstep more on Vista and Win7, I do us FAT. Support for 
NTFS is bad on Linux; BSD and Mac so most shared volumes are common in 
FAT! So do I. Network file-systems also are not as capable of NTFS.
Is non-flattened of use on Windows?

Actually we just discovered that also flattened has troubles on windows 
without tricks, even if I was building on Win7.

> The Debian FHS installation expects something more like this (rough idea);

If I see the idea of non-flattened as a clean way to have different 
versions inside a bundle, I see somehow little value in having 
non-flattened in FHS. What advantages would it have?


> We may also need a few new options in gnustep-make to more clearly 
> differentiate between types of resources.  On the other hand, perhaps we can 
> just put architecture dependent resources in an appropriate subdirectory in the 
> source tree and build in some intelligence to gnustep-make to have it 
> understand what they are and how they should be installed.

Do you mean differentiating resources like plists, languages and images 
versus bundled frameworks and bundles, which are arch dependent?

Riccardo