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Re: possible mass-filing of bugs: many shared library packages contain binaries in usr/bin



On Monday 06 May 2002 19:18, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net> writes:
> > No, the attitude that some Hurd people show annoys me somewhat. So
> > far I haven't seen a good argument from anyone for a libexec
> > hierarchy except `performance reasons'.
>
> libexec should be separated from lib for the same reason that etc
> should be separate from var: it makes good sense to separate different
> kinds of files rather than dumping them all in one directory.
>
Different point of view: Both lib and libexec contain code that is not 
programs to be invoked by $user. Therefore they should go to the same dir.


Just to throw my 2¢ in here for a sensible solution:
- all lib-files follow above description (not to be invoked by $user)
- they can be further categorized by whether they are (pure) libraries or 
executables
- next step is to split them by their type: script or binary
- one step further, you could split the libs by their language/ABI (C, 
g++2.95, g++3.0 g++3.1, python, perl, scheme)
- another split is dynamically linkable libs or static libs
- ...

What I want to show is that you can almost infinitely split the current /lib 
or /usr/lib into smaller sections. Whether you take one section (executables) 
and move them to a totally different folder (/libexec or maybe /lib/exec/) is 
rather a cosmetic reason (although it can also have performance reasons).


What this still doesn't solve is that those binaries are not versioned, thus 
preventing them to from coexisting in different versions. And that is exectly 
the problem we are facing. Whether /libexec get introduced into Debian/FHS is 
a totally different question, there I would rather look at how it breaks 
other software, how much work it would be etc.

Another way to make clear why you're not getting close to a solution is this 
one: someone said in this thread that proper usage of libexec installed 
binaries under /libexec/libname/version/myexecutable. Even without a separate 
/libexec, properly installing binaries in /lib would mean imho throwing them 
into /lib/libname/version/myexecutable ! Throwing the simply to lib without 
versioning [1] them in any way is the problem.

peace

Uli



[1] SOs are versioned with their filename, versioning by path is also 
feasible and works, here performance-reasons have to be considered I think.


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