Re: policy for location of web content - application uploaded images

[The Fungi <fungi@yuggoth.org>]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 12:44:56PM -0500, Karl Schmidt wrote:
> wordpress uses /srv/www/.../uploaded pictures
> mediawiki uses /var/lib/mediawiki/images/
> 
> Seems like wordpress is doing this correctly  - from fhs  - /var/lib is for
> "variable state information"
> 
> and "/srv : Data for services provided by this system"

This comes up frequently on debian-devel (the most recent thread I
recall being just a few weeks ago
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/08/msg00347.html ), and
consensus is that packaging and packaged software should not touch
/srv by default, but should allow the admin to configure things to
write into /srv if deemed relevant.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

   [...]
   no program should rely on a specific subdirectory structure of
   /srv existing or data necessarily being stored in /srv
   [...]
   http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/srv.html

If an application has a need to write data to the system which
should remain there indefinitely so it can access it again later,
and which can't be easily/quickly regenerated by that application,
it should go into the /var/lib directory heirarchy by default. Data
uploaded by users through a Web UI provided by a packaged
application seems to me to fit this description.
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