Fedora (Linux) is Destroying it self

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Dienstag, den 12.05.2009, 10:47 +0200 schrieb Michael Nielsen:

> I know of the standard, however, I really doubt the current Fedora
> configuration really
> follows it, 

Can you elaborate this allegation a little? Where _exactly_ does Fedora
not follow it? The previous examples you gave were not proving your
point of view: /usr/local is not meant to be touched by package
management and /opt is not for things that belong to the distro itself.

> I still don't see why everything needs to be thrown in /usr/bin? 

Because it _is_ the standard and has been for years.
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRBINMOSTUSERCOMMANDS

> Thus if you need to run a non-packaged software, due to patches that
> you need (security),

Such patches should be in the package, file a bug if they are not. You
have an example of that handy?

>  you can 
> only hope that the package manager successfully removes everything,
> and does not leave junk behind
> which may, or may not affect the running of the newer compilation.

Again: Example? rpmdb tracks all files, so there shouldn't be left
anything behind.

> Throwing everything in one directory hierarchy causes one particular
> problem that I personally find
> rather annoying, the inability to use the package manager system to
> have multiple versions of 
> for-instance firefox installed on a system, as I often test on
> multiple versions, however, if I do not
> use the package manager, it is trivial to have multiple versions of an
> application installed,
> however, now the updates for the application is disabled, and they
> need to be manually updated,
> which is annoying.

This has nothing to do with the file system layout but with package
management itself: A package manager will not install two versions of
the same package but upgrade the older one.

> The same situation can be seen when you run 64 bit systems, sometimes
> you need to run something 
> in 32bit compatibility, however you cannot install the libraries you
> need because of conflicts in the
> packaging system, as - again - everything is thrown into one directory
> - in this case the /usr/share/doc
> directory, which means you need to find out how to force the
> installation of the libraries.

The problems with docdir were solved *long* time ago [1], so you can
easily install both 32 and 64 bit packages. Obviously you did not try
for the last two - three years, which makes your criticism pretty
pointless.

> /mike.

Regards,
Christoph

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=209306
The fact that this bug was opened in October 2006 shows that it was very
well possible to install both i386 and x86_64 together at that time.