Status and outlook of LSB and FHS compliance of Fedora.

[Per Bjornsson]

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 11:31, Aaron Bennett wrote:
> ok then, according to the spec all of the Fedora.us (Fedora Extras) 
> stuff should go under /opt.

Sorry,but this is such a straw man argument! The Fedora Extras (and
other repos as well) packages are made specifically to fit in with the
Fedora distribution and can thus easily be seen as system-native
packages that should go in the /usr hierarchy. And really, that's the
obvious, sane reading: packages that are built for the distribution's
native packaging system should go in the /usr hierarchy.

"Add-on packages" would typically be (often binary-only) programs that
are not available packaged and that the sysadmin doesn't want to spend
time repackaging so that it integrates nicely into the distribution
package system. For example, I have MATLAB on a few machines; I'm mot
going to spend time packaging it up. Thus I dump it in /opt/matlab,
knowing that /opt is a nice place to dump stuff that I need to take care
of myself and that I don't have to worry about interfering with RPM when
I do that.

> Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha wrote:
> > Sun's java rpm doesn't in my linux system.
> > 
> 
> All of their Solaris stuff does under Solaris... that's what I meant.

Come on. Sun being boneheaded is completely irrelevant to Fedora.

> > Why should any package from any vendor for any system that allows seamless
> > installation, removal, listing and verification have to go to /opt?
> > 
> 
> I don't know.  I'm not advocating moving anything to /opt.  For a number 
> of reasons I hate it.  What I'm saying is just moving a bunch of stuff 
> to /svr won't achieve FHS compliance unless /opt is addressed. 

Only with some stupid fundamentalist reading of the FHS. Read what it
says but no more. The most reasonable reading is that "add-on packages"
are programs that are not integrated into the distribution package
management system.

>  I think 
> that the FHS is a bunch of hooey, to be honest.

It seems extremely sane to have a consistent definition of where things
should go on a Linux system so that one can handle several distributions
without too many headaches (and in some cases make packages that can
work on several distributions). FHS might not be perfect, but it's there
for a very good reason, and adhering to a slightly imperfect standard
(although not to some insane obscure fundamentalist (mis)reading of it)
instead of increasing fragmentation in the name of perfection is a very
pragmatic and good thing to do.

/Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University