Comment The user can never escape awkward directory trees (Score 2, Insightful) 366
At least, so long as the system uses shared libraries.
MS-DOS was the only OS(that needed an install, Atari DOS wouldn't count there) where I really had a "clean" install the whole way through. Programs went in x, drivers in y. Everything using DOS4GW had a copy of it included with the binary, no harm done. Needless to say, configs also went alongside the binary.
Of course, this falls apart as soon as you have a more complex OS that needs things like scripting languages and windowing systems. There's just no way around shared libraries. And with shared libraries comes other kinds of shared access - to data and devices. So you have to reorganize, create new structures to hold certain kinds of files. Version conflicts, missing depends - all result from this necessity.
Of course, these structures just won't make any sense to the end user, except as a programmer. It won't matter how much you try to polish it up. A project like this might help, but putting an end to it all would probably need something along the lines of an FS and binary format revision, to include more data like the version number and purpose for each file. Good luck doing that.... :P
MS-DOS was the only OS(that needed an install, Atari DOS wouldn't count there) where I really had a "clean" install the whole way through. Programs went in x, drivers in y. Everything using DOS4GW had a copy of it included with the binary, no harm done. Needless to say, configs also went alongside the binary.
Of course, this falls apart as soon as you have a more complex OS that needs things like scripting languages and windowing systems. There's just no way around shared libraries. And with shared libraries comes other kinds of shared access - to data and devices. So you have to reorganize, create new structures to hold certain kinds of files. Version conflicts, missing depends - all result from this necessity.
Of course, these structures just won't make any sense to the end user, except as a programmer. It won't matter how much you try to polish it up. A project like this might help, but putting an end to it all would probably need something along the lines of an FS and binary format revision, to include more data like the version number and purpose for each file. Good luck doing that....
