On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, Steve Cayford wrote: > Mike Miller wrote: >> [...] >> I'm getting the impression that package installation in Linux can be >> pretty haphazard. > > It used to be pretty haphazard. It seems like it's moving toward a > pretty consistent standard with LSB and the Filesystem Hierarchy > Standard. > > http://proton.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html Thanks for mentioning LSB. I was going to ask about that. It seems highly relevant to our current discussion. It must have been 5 years ago that I first heard of it and since then I thought it was being adopted widely. We also have POSIX and SUS. You'd think these things would impose enough structure on the system to protect us from some of the problems just described, but I guess not. By the way, why doesn't LINUX stand for "LINUX Is Not UniX"? It should! (I assume most of you know that GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix" and PHP stands for "PHP Hypertext Processor".) I hadn't thought of it before, or heard it before, but I'm not surprised to see that I wasn't the first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review/Linux/Archive1 Linus would have been way cleverer if he had come up with the abbreviation, I think, and let people notice the similarity with his name instead of just saying that he had named it after himself. Mike