> "magic"

Magic is illusion. It's things appearing to work in a way that they don't actually work, and as such the illusion collapses when you attempt to do something not accounted for by the magician. Case in point: Haiku applications appear to be files, but if you try to move them then you get told you can't modify a read only file system. Even if you did manage it it sounds like they wouldn't work because you didn't really move the application, because it isn't really there and is part of a different file (hpkg) somewhere else that you should have moved instead. The only way to fix these inconsistencies is to employ even more magic to hide the way things actually work. That's magic.

> If your objection to Haiku is "I don't want a package manager", point blank, then I can tell you why people like them and why we do, but obviously there is nothing for me to argue with there.

I have other criticisms of Haiku, but we seem to be stuck on this one so I haven't brought them up. Not that it matters, because as mentioned I'm just someone on the sidelines pointing out things I personally don't like while you and other Haiku developers are actually doing the work. I have a particular hatred for package managers, it's true, and it's because they only exist to manage dependencies which is something I don't think should have to be managed at all, and they do so by restriction.

> Haiku's philosophy is "sane defaults and minimal configuration where necessary." We have a "pseudo-test" that we generally go through before adding new options to the GUI (1. Did you ever change this setting? 2. Did changing it make you happier?)

Consider that both of these things are highly subjective, and who's choosing them? If it is developers, then, well, it's kind of a feedback loop isn't it? Keep going that way and if you're not careful you become Gnome.

> Well, I certainly am not the biggest fan of the "everything is a file" philosophy indeed; but I also think if you took a poll among Haiku users and developers about `/dev/` you would not get a majority concensus

Why do you insist on making this appeals to the majority all the time? The end of that logic train is "everyone should just use Chromebooks". The fact that you're even bothering to work on Haiku suggests minority opinions should matter doesn't it? Besides, as I keep saying, I don't really care what the "majority" thinks.

> to hide it more (it already does not appear in the GUI), and most would either be neutral or opposed to removing it (in favor of handles.) So if you are opposed to even `/dev`, then I think your philosophy and Haiku's are much more irreconcilable than I realized.

As I said, ideally /dev wouldn't exist. I assume Haiku has it because it wants to be more UNIX compatible. If I made my own system based on the Linux kernel I'd almost certainly have to expose it somewhere too simply because there's no other way to interact with devices in Linux.

> You are misinformed. `/boot` just refers to the partition Haiku is currently booted from. So `/boot/home` is where the normal home directory is (unless one has moved it). So there is no "system partition" segmented from the "data partition" as such, no.

I can see how that could have been misconveyed, but that is what I meant. The "system" partition is the officially blessed one where applications are "installed" into the system.

> But this is what Haiku does; the system is `haiku.hpkg`, and we just also have those files appear in `/system/, too, because to us hiding them completely would be much more "magical" (or more properly, opaque).

Fair enough, but why does it need to have applications installed on the same partition? You keep saying that this isn't a technical limitation, which I guess is true so long as one is somehow able to properly bless the appropriate partitions. Of course, right now that would mean recompiling Haiku if I wanted to run something off a thumb drive.

> Which is a decision that is, as I noted already, open to change. There is no technical reason it has not been done.

If what you're saying is true, then no, it's just a cultural one. That's almost worse. Linux doesn't need to do things the way it does either, but culturally it is impossible to do something else at this point.