FHS adoption (was: weekly policy summary)
> Adopt the FHS in place of FSSTND (#37345)
> * Stalled.
> * Proposed on 09 May 99 by Julian Gilbey; seconded by Joseph Carter,
> Aaron Van Couwenberg and Marco d'Itri.
> * Modify policy to require use of the FHS, with possible exceptions.
> ( A new version of the FHS is out, that does away with /var/state
> and some other things and may be easier to switch to. )
I guess that this last comment is the reason that this proposal has
been marked as stalled. I would suggest that we plan to adopt the FHS
anyway, pating attention to the changes which will appear in FHS 2.1,
as available in the pre-release version. This is a message which Joel
Klecker posted to -devel on the subject. I would strongly suggest
that we go for the FHS anyway, bearing in mind that we will not need
to move from /var/lib to /var/state or /var/spool/mail to /var/mail.
But if we have any intention of adopting the FHS for potato or woody,
we really ought to get moving on it.
And do we have any ideas yet of how to handle architecture-dependent
docs? I would suggest having them in /usr/lib/<package>/examples with
a symlink from /usr/share/doc/<package>/examples. Any thoughts on
this possibility?
I also sense that fine details of problems with the current FHS will
only appear with time once we begin to migrate towards it; our
experience with adopting the FHS will help to influence its
development.
Let's go for it!
Julian
Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 00:01:41 -0700
To: Debian Developers <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
From: Joel Klecker <jk@espy.org>
Subject: Fwd: FHS pre-2.1 draft #1 on web site
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 22:35:07 -0700
From: Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com>
To: lsb-spec@linuxbase.org
Subject: FHS pre-2.1 draft #1 on web site
FYI - I just made a pre-release of FHS 2.1 on the fhs-discuss@ucsd.edu
mailing list. If you have any comments, please direct them to the FHS
mailing list or directly to me (and not this list).
------- start of cut text --------------
FHS 2.1 will be a much needed update. The reason is not so much for
the ideas being discussed on the FHS mailing list recently, but for
fixing some basic problems with FHS 2.0. These are problems that
developers from various distributions (Caldera, Debian, Red Hat, and
SuSE) have requested that FHS 2.1 fix.
The major changes are as follows:
/var/state is back at /var/lib, but using the /var/state
specification. Moving the directory was unnecessary and was a
stopping point for distributions. Tweaking the specification a
little was okay, but moving it was evidently not.
/var/mail is back at /var/spool/mail. Various solutions, such as
allowing either with symbolic links have been discussed ad-nauseum
on both the FHS and LSB mailing lists. Since nobody (that I'm
aware of) has actually used /var/mail in a distribution or
application, the best fix is to switch back. Locally, people can
use whatever symbolic links they want, as always. Applications and
distributions need to reference /var/spool/mail (as they do in
reality).
A number of editorial changes from Bernd Warken have also been
integrated into the draft. I hope I got them all right. Thanks,
Bernd.
I'm hoping to make at least one or two more fixes prior to FHS 2.1
being released, but they will be the subject of another posting.
My plan is that FHS 2.2 will be significantly rewritten. Some parts
of the specification are lost causes and should be totally redone.
For example, instead of saying: these binaries go into /bin and these
other ones go into /usr/bin. We should really say that some small
number (like /bin/sh) are fixed in certain locations and the rest may
either appear in /bin or /usr/bin (probably using the PATH mechanism
to access them).
Get it at:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/fhs-2.1-pre-01.tar.gz
Dan
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer. jdg@debian.org
-*- Finger jdg@master.debian.org for my PGP public key. -*-
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