From: Eivind Eklund <eeklund@...>
Date: 2005-10-02T21:01:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Gems is over engineered

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On 10/2/05, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> So I've been thinking about this and I've come to the conclusion
> >>> that all versioning belongs to the LIB only!
> >> This is incorrect, as noted above. Versioning can be applied to
> >> either data or libs.
> > Sure, but my point is then why separate them?
>
> Hrm. Because FreeBSD and Debian and ... various other platforms demand
> that they be separated or they're not right.


Actually, there's some reasoning behind the madness:
- We try to support users that want read-only for certain directories
- We try to make it possible for users to share as much as possible between
different architectures

lib is by definition architecture specific (unshared) and can be read only,
while share is architecture neutral and possible to share. Both should be
able to be read-only except during install. Data that vary should be put in
/var.

This was originally intended to protect the share/ and lib/ directories fro=
m
corruption due to the amount of changes. Nowadays, it is more important tha=
t
it let the user take backup of static data (lib/, share/) only occasionally
and varying data frequently, and can have the varying data on different
kinds of media (e.g, RAID-0+1 instead of RAID-0 with backup).

There's reasons for each and every one of the directory recommendations,
some important, some not so important. I'd be happy to go through them with
you (tomorrow or tuesday) if you're so inclined. I don't know of any centra=
l
repository for the information.

Eivind.
--
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RPA is available from http://www.rubyarchive.org/

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