
GoboLinux 015 released - jhasse
http://www.gobolinux.org/
======
snowpalmer
Really excited to see this get active again. GoboLinux sets itself apart from
other distributions being one of the few that tackle a drastic change to the
filesystem. They keep compatibility with the filesystem hierarchy standard via
symlinks but that is mostly hidden from the user.

For those wondering about more information there is definitely a better
writeup about the file system layout on wikipedia.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux)

As well as more recently written slides

[http://gobolinux.org/doc/fisl2014/GoboLinux-015.pdf](http://gobolinux.org/doc/fisl2014/GoboLinux-015.pdf)

I'd say the filesystem is really the differentiator here. Back when I first
tried it out boot times were insanely fast compared to other distros of the
day _. However I 'm sure that gap has been shortened (if not inversed..
haven't tried the latest version.)

_ Not saying the filesystem had anything to do with the boottimes. That was
because they use a different boot system.

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vertex-four
Another distribution which ditches the FHS is NixOS. On top of this, it
implements a configuration management system as a core part of the OS, is a
source distro with an online binary cache (so installing things by default
doesn't require building anything, but it's very easy to modify package
definitions), and allows for very easy rollbacks, multiple system
environments, and a bunch more interesting stuff. It's also not had a multi-
year hiatus as a recent part of its history.

~~~
jhasse
True. But the hashes Nix uses in folder names make it a bit more complicated
than it has to be. But I like both GoboLinux and NixOS and really hope one of
them or a similar approach takes off some day.

~~~
darklajid
As someone that just (2? 3? days ago) migrated his laptop to nixos I can
certainly sympathize. That said, hashes aren't a big issue and the community
is quite nice. Packages aren't thaaaat up to date, but pull requests to bump
these things are answered in days (sometimes hours). I have FreeBSD PRs open
for weeks...

In the end I like it. I'm not sure if this is the best thing ever, but I
appreciate the fact that I have a single file that describes my whole system.

~~~
vertex-four
> Packages aren't thaaaat up to date, but pull requests to bump these things
> are answered in days (sometimes hours).

It's also possible to write custom packages as part of your configuration if
you need them "right now", through `packageOverrides`. As a general rule,
packages are updated by people who need newer versions of packages; there's
not really a maintainer infrastructure like most distros have. If something
needs to be done, whoever is affected by it does that thing. I'll point out
that there's not a security team either yet, so it's not really suitable for
real production use.

Personally, as someone who's battled the usual configuration management
approach of "here's a fully working OS with its own ideas of how things should
be done... now modify that through a really awful ad-hoc scripting language
without breaking anything", NixOS is amazing. It's even possible to build
tests into your system configuration!

------
FreakyT
I wish other distros would follow GoboLinux's lead and do away with the
horrible "standard" Unix filesystem. It is a usability disaster.

~~~
dikei
I actually like the standard Unix filesystem layout, I find it much better
organized than the one used by Windows or OS X.

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thebeardisred
So just to be clear this is a version of Linux which abandons the filesystem
hierarchy standard? (man 7 hier ;
[http://www.pathname.com/fhs/](http://www.pathname.com/fhs/))

~~~
akerl_
Based on the first paragraph of the site, they're indeed using their own
filesystem layout. Whether or not it's cleaner/easier/useful is, of course, up
to the user.

------
wolfhumble
From
[http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance](http://www.gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance)

 _~] ls -l /usr/include/stdio.h | cut -b 45-

stdio.h -> /Programs/Glibc/2.3.6/include/stdio.h_

Does anyone know what happens if e.g. a later version of Glibc overwrites the
stdio.h 2.3.6 version found under /usr/include/stdio.h?

How does GoboLinux still retain its "compatibility with the Unix legacy" in
such situations without breaking things?

~~~
qbrass
It builds software in it's own namespace so it sees /usr/include/stdio.h as a
symlink to whatever version it was built for, and the symlink won't change if
you update Glibc.

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alex_duf
Why ? I mean don't get me wrong, it does look organized yes, but can someone
explain me the pros and cons about such a thing ? the website is very sparse
about it.

~~~
sprash
For example:

* Installation of multiple versions of the same program is trivial

* Uninstall programs just by deleting a Folder

~~~
hrjet
But you would still need a tool to manage dependencies, track updates, etc.
And it will be this tool that you will need to use to keep the system in a
consistent state.

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favadi
I don't see the point. If it's all about easy to compile and use multiple
software versions, why not just install stow in your current distro?

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ginko
So is version 015 supposed to be 13 or 15?

~~~
hisham_hm
Yes, 015 is 13 octal. :) Remember when a bunch of distros inflated their
version numbers to catch up with each other? We decided to poke fun on that
and make the GoboLinux version numbers octal, so we'd have "scheduled bumps",
so yes, we went from 007 to 010, and will go from 017 straight to 020 in the
future :)

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meemo
The filesystem sounds similar to what Homebrew for OS X does.

~~~
No1
More appropriately, Homebrew is _very_ similar to GoboLinux's Rootless
project.

It's also worth noting GoboLinux predates Homebrew by about 7 years.

~~~
hisham_hm
In fact, the original documentation of Homebrew described this approach as
"The GoboLinux Way". (They no longer call it that, but this reference is
buried somewhere in their git history.)

