SFSget improved and folder hierarchy reconsidered

Just a short note, that I have been working on "sfsget", the SFS downloader and installer. Various refinements, including much more aware of installing to the main desktop instead of as a container.

This revamp was triggered with Chromium, which is not really suitable for running in a container. It has its own sandbox, which is effectively a container. Easy Containers are "crippled root" and the Chromium sandbox does not work in a container -- it would be a sandbox-within-a-sandbox. So Chromium would have to run with "--no-sandbox" in a container.

I introduced a new value, "DB_install=mainonly" for SFS specs, which constrains it to install only on the main desktop.

Other news is the folder hierarchy. For users, I have placed them under /clients, however a couple of people have contacted me expressing some discomfort with this.

The reason was, basically, that /home is already claimed as the default path for downloading, images, videos, etc. For the 'root' user anyway.

I am rethinking this, thinking of going back to a more standard Unix filesystem hierarchy, with users under /home, and change current /home to /files.

EDIT:
It is done! Folder /home has been renamed to /files, and folder /clients has been moved to /home.

The problem started right back when EasyOS was first designed, early in 2017. As Easy is a single-user OS, I considered that /home folder could be re-purposed as the "home" for all downloaded files and a storage place for any files, such as images and videos. The name "home" seemed appropriate.

Early-on the only non-root user was 'spot', and that was located at /root/spot

The repercussion was, when I started to create users, 'zeus' and 'rover', I didn't know where to put their home folders. Putting them all in /root did not seem satisfactory.

Then a few days ago, launched on running network-connected apps each as its own user. So SeaMonkey will run as user 'seamonkey'. As /home had been co-opted, I created /clients, and put all the users in there.

I had the nagging feeling that I had "gone down a rabbit hole" with this, and suddenly yesterday, decided, going to "bite the bullet" and redesign EasyOS with a more traditional folder hierarchy. /home is now for users, and the place for the administrator ('root') to download and store files is now /files.

So, yes, there is still a top-level folder /files, that is not in the Linux standard filesystem hierarchy. Though, it is only a symlink to /mnt/${WKG_DEV}/${WKG_DIR}files, which is a folder on the working-partition.

Note, the old Quirky Linux had top-level /file symlink, which served the same purpose, the administrator's file storage place.

Conversion was an intense effort, about 111 files in woofQ had to be edited, most of which did automatically with a script, had to edit about a dozen manually. Some PET packages needed to be fixed.

Did a quick build and bootup, yep, works.     

Tags: easy