Re: kde and files location
Christian Schwarz wrote:
>
> According to the FHS draft, /opt will be treated like /usr/local :
> "/opt is reserved for the installation of add-on application software
> packages". This means: no Debian package may touch /opt.
>
Humm, the way I read the FHS draft is that the reservation to local
sysadmin is for populating the dirs in /opt outside the package
Hierarchy, not for its "use".
This area isn't a duplicate of /usr/local, but is reserved for packages
coming from third parts (and maybe using their own installation scheme).
The reservation to the local sysadmin is because, after having
"put-in-place" the package, he (and not the third party) should install
symlinks or wrapper scripts to permit access from user's PATH and/or
space (anyway confined in the /opt hierarchy with only 2 exceptions
/etc/opt and /var/opt).
But when the debian maintainer or a local sysadmin use the debian
package system to install the package coming from the third part, he is
not only "putting-in-place", but also installing it: thus I say then,
when creating this type of packages, we should "put" it in /opt and
create symlinks or wrappers from the part of the file system that we
control (we can do it _because_ we control it; the same is not allowed
to externally created packages because they don't control the fs except
for /opt/<their-package>).
I think that the argument about "who controls what goes where" is the
right way to solve the triple conflict between OS, sysadmin and program
supplier, each of which has different goals and ways to look at the file
system structure (OS thinks in terms of user's namespace, sysadmin in
terms of shares and mount between all his machine/architectures, and
program supplier thinks in term of package organization common to _all_
the OSes he supports)
Thinking this way we could end thinking that packages that doesn't
belong to Debian should go under /opt (like non-free stuff or packages
prepared and supplied directly from other sources).
In fact think of the possibility that someone like corel-draw or
netscape decide to package their linux port directly also in the debian
format. We maybe don't like them to "use" our namespace putting for
example an executable called "man" under /usr/bin.
But they don't have to follow our-guidelines. Thus FHS tells them that
they MUST put their things under /opt and the installer (the local
sysadmin in their words, but I can think of dpkg as the installer)
chooses the way to "connect" things that _are_ inside of their namespace
with user's paths and so on.
As the same draft says, if this had been done for X11 from the very
first moment, we would have now a cleaner /usr space.
If you think we should move this to fhs-discuss, I'll follow you.
Fabrizio
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