Introduction, and Proposed GSFH.

[Tim Harrison]

<considering the whole #import/#include flamewar lately, I hesitated to 
post this, but have been urged to do so, so please be gentle>


Hello all.

First off, let me introduce myself.  My name is Tim Harrison (as I'm 
sure you can see from my address :)).  I am not a GNUstep developer. 
I'm just starting with Objective-C and GNUstep (about 5 months now), and 
have only done a minimal amount of C/C++ work in the past 10 years.

What I am, is a network administrator, designer, and engineer.  At 
least, those are the titles I keep ending up having. :)  I have a 
fondness for operating systems, and, currently, have a shelf and a room 
full of machines and OSs.

About 5 months ago, I was talking with my close friend and partner in 
crime about development environments.  He develops in more languages 
than I can count on my fingers and toes.  His favourite is Objective-C. 
 As a Mac and Linux user, he wanted the kind of dev environment on 
Linux that he had on his OS X machine.  I offhandedly made a comment 
that he should write his own operating system.  We laughed, I went home, 
and it was forgotten for about... an hour.

Later that evening, I started ripping apart my SuSE installation, and 
creating a test system.  When I showed it to my friend in the morning, 
he was overcome with joy, and suggested we continue, and really build it.

Five months later, and we're working on finishing the latest release of 
what has been dubbed (rather unimaginatively -- blame me for that) 
LinuxSTEP.  Currently, the system is not easily installable, and has 
many things terribly wrong with it.  However, 0.2.5 will fix all those 
issues, and will be installable via either CD-ROM, or over the internet.

So, enough about that.  Down to my real purpose for this post.

Lately, with LinuxSTEP development, I've been finding it exceedingly 
harder and harder to integrate GNUstep.  The primary reason being, it's 
filesystem layout leaves empty directories, redundant directories (well, 
at least on LinuxSTEP), and the organisation seems a little confusing. 
Upon casting about for some documentation on why things were designed 
the way they were, I came up with little to nothing.

After speaking with a few of the regulars on the #GNUstep IRC channel 
(in which I'm a constant pain in the hindquarters), I decided I'd have a 
go at a Proposed GNUstep Filesystem Hierarchy Document.  However, as I 
sat down to write it, a few nagging questions came to mind:

1.  Is this supposed to mimic OPENSTEP?
2.  Does GNUstep, as the website says, intend to lean more toward Mac OS X?
3.  Who does one talk to about the basic layout of this thingee?
4.  There had to be some docs somewhere at one point... where might they be?
5.  Am I sacrificing a sacred cow by proposing that certain things be 
changed?
6.  Is my tea water boiling?

I could find an answer to only one of those questions.  So, I commenced 
writing, and have produced a quick pre-pre-pre-first draft of a proposed 
GNUstep Filesystem Hierarchy Document, which, at this point in time, 
only includes the "System" directory.

Considering I know how annoyed I get when people send attachments to my 
mailing lists (and in a thinly veiled and desperate attempt to drive 
traffic to our website -- please forgive the HORRIBLE HTML, I'm no good 
at it), I have made it available on the web for perusal, with the 
intention of sparking some very constructive discussion.  The document 
can be viewed at:


http://www.linuxstep.org/documentation/GNUstepFH.html


Because LinuxSTEP and GNUstep will be so tightly integrated (GNUstep 
will be as much a part of LinuxSTEP as, say, glibc, or gcc), it's very 
important to me to know that the two will play nicely together.  I also 
wanted to attempt to contribute in some way.  As I mentioned waaay up at 
the top, I'm not a very good coder, so I've tried my best to help in 
other ways.

So, please, check out what I've written, and give me your constructive
criticism.  I'm eager to continue with my work on shoehorning GNUstep 
into LinuxSTEP, so this type of discussion is very important to me.

Also, in case anyone is curious, and with all due respect to Mr. Hardin 
for his excellent work with Simply GNUstep, LinuxSTEP is a *VERY* 
different beastie.  It's been designed to NOT be a standard Linux 
system.  I know we'll probably take a bit of flack for that, and I have 
no problem with that.  We, the LinuxSTEP team, will be happy if we're 
the only ones who end up using it, when all is said and done.

--

Tim Harrison
harrison@timharrison.com
http://www.linuxstep.org/