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There are a few "publications". I gave a presentation at linux.conf.au 2010 on the system as a whole that covers everything generally, which is available in video: ogv mp4 (also on your local Linux Australia mirror); I also wrote up my notes into prose. There are also a few older documents, including the famous "I am not clueless", on the GoboLinux website, which addresses some objections and issues. I think that we're all a bit less gung-ho these days, and I suspect that a future release will adopt /usr as the base location for the symlinks.

There are a few "publications". I gave a presentation at linux.conf.au 2010 on the system as a whole that covers everything generally, which is available in video: ogv mp4 (also on your local Linux Australia mirror); I also wrote up my notes into prose. There are also a few older documents, including the famous "I am not clueless", on the GoboLinux website, which addresses some objections and issues. I think that we're all a bit less gung-ho these days, and I suspect that a future release will adopt /usr as the base location for the symlinks.

A combined problem is the /usr/share directory. It's for shared files, of course, but when you put every program in its own prefix they're no longer actually shared. That leads to programs unable to find standard icons and the like. GoboLinux deals with this in a pretty ugly way: at build time, $prefix/share is a symlink to $prefix/Shared, and after building the link is pointed to the global share directory instead.

¹ I suspect a future version may drop the Links hierarchy and use /usr across the board.

A combined problem is the /usr/share directory. It's for shared files, of course, but when you put every program in its own prefix they're no longer actually shared. That leads to programs unable to find standard icons and the like. GoboLinux dealt with this in a pretty ugly way: at build time, $prefix/share was a symlink to $prefix/Shared, and after building the link was pointed to the global share directory instead. It now uses compile-time sandboxing and file movement to deal with share (and the other directories), but runtime errors from reading links can still be an issue.

¹ Version 14.01 uses /System/Index, which maps directly onto /usr. I suspect a future version may drop the Links/Index hierarchy and use /usr across the board.

Publications