Re: KDE filesystem structure
On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Eray Ozkural (exa) wrote:
> It seems that your reasoning that "/opt is reserved for things like Loki
> games" is incorrect. See my mail titled "Interpeting FHS".
>
[...]
>
> That is a serious misunderstanding of "add-on". By add-on here it means
> application software that is not essential for system functionality, such as
> KDE. Saying that "distribution provided" software is not "add on application
> software" is gross misunderstanding of the terms involved.
Yes I saw it but you are still missing the point. English is not the most
precise of languages but the meaning of add-on should be fairly clear. It
is something extra beyond what is provided in the base distribution. So
how would you define that for Debian? contrib and non-free which are not
officially part of Debian? Any package of priority optional or extra? As
you can see none of those packages are placed in /opt.
The use of /opt goes back to the bad old days of commercial UNIX when
vendors would try and soak you for every penny you had. (I believe with
SCO even TCP/IP was an add-on at one point!) You would have a base OS and
other extra packages you could purchase. Also third-party vendors would
sell their own packages. Plus there was free software. All of those
things were usually placed in /opt to signify they were not part of the
base OS. For instance on a Solaris 8 system I have here there are only
three things under /opt. /opt/gnome-1.4 is GNOME, not a Sun product.
/opt/sfw comes from a CD of freeware they put out which again is not a Sun
product and /opt/SUNWebnfs is WebNFS which is a Sun product but not part
of basic Solaris.
Now how do you map this concept of addons to Debian? All our packages,
even the "extra" and "non-free" ones are first-class citizens. We don't
sell enhancements or upgrades. Conceivably in the days of the licensing
wars you could have considered KDE an "add-on" to Debian but not now.
>
> On the contrary, FHS says distributions can install software in /opt, except
> certain subdirs reserved for the system administrator.
>
Does SuSe consider KDE3 to be a "preview" release or unsupported or
sometheing you pay extra for? Then it would be legitimate to put it into
/opt. If they are just too lazy to properly integrate it into their
system then this is not something we should be emulating.
> Before you give an answer to this, please read the mail I mentioned, and
> section 3.8 in complete.
>
Also bear in mind the purpose of the FHS is not just to set policy but
codify existing practice. Somethings may be allowed which are not
necessarily recommended to do.
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
It's a girl! See the pictures - http://www.braincells.com/shailaja/
Reply to: