Re: hmm...

[Michael Goetze <mgoetze5@yahoo.com>]

> I just had a look. It is very similar to the NetBSD layout (which is
> very largely unchanged from 4.4BSD). There are some annoying
> differences, including /opt vs /usr/pkg, the whole BSD concept of
> libdata and libexec, etc. However, the overall ideas seem to be
> pretty much similar. 

You'll be happy to find out that debian doesn't put anything in /opt.
And /usr/pkg is what we're trying to replace, isn't it?

> (The lack of things like libexec seems like a serious deficit in the
> FHS -- it highly unclutters user executable directories. /opt is
> likely a religious issue which means trouble but if one anticipates
> trouble it is possible to avoid it...)

As I said, I'm not a big fan...

> Now, I have serious doubts that the NetBSD world would be interested
> in changing how it handles its hierarchy, but the similarity means
> that conditional build techniques would make it fairly
> straightforward to make both a FHS and a NetBSD style file layout
> possible without large amounts of pain. They aren't very different.

Hm, yeah, maybe add an option to the whole system for hierarchy layout?
There's been some talk of putting traceroute et al in /usr/bin instead
of /usr/sbin because it can be used by non-root users, and of course
there are people on both sides of the argument (on debian-devel, that
is)... so maybe an option for what kind of layout people want is in
order anyways. More work for the package maintainers, though. :-(

> I have to learn more about how Debian package tools work -- I'd
> appreciate more links to useful reading...

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ :-)

- Michael

PS Could you please stop sending me duplicates of your replies? I'm
subscribed to this list, y'know... ;-)

=====
"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing
one can be sure of changing is oneself."
  -- Aldous Huxley

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