This post has “everything” in the same way as the buffet of the Beau Rivage at midnight: the goods are warmed over, but the overs are good warm.

the odd sobriquet of Auxolotl

Has the pendulum swung back already? I make it to parenthood just in time for puns to fall out of favor?

Now that Dr Dolstra has gone

Dr Dolstra

This particular curmudgeon, though, feels that this particular Nix fork missed a big opportunity: to automatically generate and manage more human-readable filesystems.

The cardinal sin of Nix is apparently naming things. Since Aux exists for any other reason than fixing this, it has not atoned and can never atone.

Nix works wonders by automatically storing code in a software-generated and software-managed directory hierarchy. This has a profoundly off-putting side-effect: it eliminates a human-readable filesystem.

A specter is haunting Linux - the specter of /nix/store.

This particular jaded old hack much prefers the approach of GoboLinux.

And what is the solution? FreeBSD PortsGoboLinux!

What Gobo offers is akin to semantic versioning, but applied to the filesystem: a semantic filesystem layout, where folder names encapsulate versioning info and are more meaningful than the old 1970s reduce-typing-effort-at-all-costs approach.

Cool, semantic versioning, that will save us.

The thing is, though, that we were all beginners once, and anything that makes Unix even more forbidding for both beginners and veterans is a problem.

The last great addition to Linux was FHS 2.3, apparently.