Hi,
I recently stumbled upon Gobolinux and I must say I find the idea behind it very good. It simplifies a lot of things when it comes to package management, my favourite being the handling of multiple versions of a piece of software (library or app).
There is certainly a friction caused by the UNIX folder structure with apps which were not designed with it in mind. And it's the packagers job to adapt the software to the distro's folder structure and solve eventual problems that raise out of that. I have encountered two such problems, the details of which are not important (one with the tomcat server, the other with libreoffice). I suspect Gobolinux packagers have a much easier job due to their folder layout.
So here's the idea: what if we would stop adapting software which was not designed for the UNIX structure? So, instead of spreading, for example, eclipse throughout /usr/bin, /usr/lib64 and so on, we could just put it in /opt/eclipse-platform/4.3.1-8.mga4.x86_64. That should work right?
I deliberately picked eclipse as an example, because it is designed to be just copied on the system instead of being installed (which is brilliant IMO: you download it, put it somewhere and it just works, no installations and configurations). By laying out eclipse's files differently one is essentially fighting against the stream. There's an additional complexity in the system (keeping track of the original and adapted folder structure) with (imo) questionable benefits.
Also many applications have today an automatic update feature, and there is high chance that it won't work anymore if you have changed its folder layout. So to have a consistent behaviour, the packager should disable that functionality or adapt it. If we leave the application with its original folder structure, this problem just goes away.
Looking forward to your thoughts on this.
Răzvan