Re: /usr/share

[Scott Ellis <storm@gate.net>]

Umm, did you even read the FHS before posting this?  /usr/share is
mandated by FHS

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-4.8.html

I'm not even going to bother to post about the rest of this other than to
say that there is a planned feature of dpkg&co to be able to exclude
certain directories from being installed.

On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Brian White wrote:

> I'm finding that I really dislike having packages put things in /usr/share.
> 
> 1) If /usr/share is a read-only mount, then I have to unmount it.  This means
>    that all the files under /usr/share still get installed on my machine even
>    if I'm mounting that directory from elsewhere.  (I can delete them, but
>    it's still an inconvenience and I never remember to unmount until I
>    get an error.)
> 
> 2) If /usr/share is a read-write mount , then I can overwrite what is already
>    there and thus possibly cause incompatibilities on other network machines
>    that could be, at best, difficult to trace.
> 
> 3) If I don't mount /usr/share, then it uses the same amount of disk space
>    as if it was installed under /usr with no added value.
> 
> So, in the case of #1 and #3 there is no savings in disk space and in the
> case of #2 (and I'd think read-write mounts of /usr/share are uncommon) there
> is a danger of causing incompatibilities.
> 
> Thus, I propose we make /usr/share be treated the same way as /usr/local
> and not allow packages to put anything under it but directories.  In most
> cases, it should be easy to make the program search /usr/local, then
> /usr/share, then /usr/lib, so we can still keep the same basic functionality.
> 
> I think this would be a good policy for Debian 2.1.  I can see no advantages
> to using /usr/share in packages except for having shared configuration and
> this can easily (is most cases) be fixed by searching /usr/share in between
> searching /usr/local and /usr/lib.

-- 
Scott K. Ellis <storm@gate.net>                 http://www.gate.net/~storm/