Conflict between GNU CS and FHS

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 13:46 +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:

> Since the latter will resolve into /usr/com if $prefix is /usr (which is 
> common when building a package for a system), a conflict arise, where FHS 
> says it should not be written to, whereas GNU CS says it is even 
> recommended to do so, provided the data is architecture-independent.
> 
> Could this issue be resolved?
Well this issue pops up at infrequent intervals - IMO, there are good
reasons why this had not been resolved and had not found a way into the
FHS.

The usual killer/devil's advocate argument/question is:

Q: Is general sharing data possible at all?
A: Yes, if your application supports all possible systems which can
access the data.

I.e. in real world cases, this hardly will ever be possible.

What is possible, is sharing data between certain systems in a
particular network. But this is a case OS vendors can't handle, and will
have to leave to sysadmins to resolve locally. 

A common approach sysadmin apply is to network-mount certain directories
into other directories between machines (c.f. to sharing /var/*mail,
or /usr/share).

>  I know $sharedstatedir is somewhat obscure, 
> but not we have a program actually using it.
I can't avoid questioning if this package's author knows what he is
doing. As far as packaging a particular package for Fedora is concerned,
I'd circumvent this issue by trying to use localstatedir instead of
using sharedstatedir, and avoid trying to resolve the gaps in standards.

Ralf