On Wednesday, January 11, 2012 11:42:08 AM Les Mikesell wrote: > On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > > On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 04:38:27 PM Les Mikesell wrote: > >> But the hardest part is that these things are application specific and > >> there is no standardization for locations where applications do > >> things. In fact, distributions intentionally move those locations > >> around in their packaging. > > Distribution differences are the price we pay for choice. > If the first thing you saw on a unix-like system was the horror of > autoconf, would you have taken a second look? The first thing I saw on a unix-like system was hand-edited Makefiles; I got into this thing before autoconf came into being, a 68k at 10MHz was fast, and 768K of RAM was enough to work with the eight-inch 1.2MB floppies and 5.25 inch full-height 12MB hard drives of the day. Having owned three different unix-like systems of that era, I'm well aware of the difficulties; and all were 680x0 systems, but all different. > This is an even worse > situation, because there is no equivalent way to describe what you > want across flavors. Yes, there is, actually. SELinux policies. > How is the application developer > (unquestionably the expert on the application needs) supposed to > describe those needs to SELinux in a way that can work across > distributions without 'less-expert' people guessing about them? This is a problem that each upstream project will need to work out for themselves. > I guess you are right about the state of the art and that it is as > wrong to expect things to work as it was to expect flying cars by now. I wish I were wrong, honestly, but it is the current state of the art. > But it would have been fun. No doubt; I'm waiting on my George Jetson air-scooter-in-a-briefcase myself.