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Should non-free and contrib packages install to /opt?



Greetings,

Is there any particular reason (besides history and inertia) that 
non-free and contrip packages aren't installed into /opt?

On the one hand, we keep saying that "Debian" is main, and that contrib 
and non-free aren't part of Debian.  That would point to labelling 
contrib and non-free as "add-on packages", which according to the FHS, 
supposedly belong in /opt.

On the other hand...

dwarf@polaris.net said:
> Debian as not yet chosen to addopt FHS, and most of the discussions on
> FHS have made it clear that many developers don't want to adopt /opt
> for anything delivered by Debian. 

(This was as part of the discussion of where to place TETware, which 
would like some separation from the rest of the installed filespace for 
its own technical reasons).

If we view non-free/contrib as being "delivered by Debian", then this 
argument would go against putting non-free/contrib in /opt.

I've gotten the impression that we want third-party add-on .deb 
packages to use /opt.  I think that by having non-free and contrib in 
/opt, we would a) distinguish between what is "debian" and what isn't 
"debian" more cleanly, and b) provide an example to other third-party 
vendors as to how /opt should be handled on a Debian system.

On a personal level, while I think that putting non-free/contrib into 
/opt is the right solution, it would be a hardship for me as a user, 
since I don't really have the space necessary to repartition my system 
to include an /opt.

Later,
  Buddha


-- 
     Buddha Buck                      bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
liberty depends upon the chaos and cacaphony of the unfettered speech
the First Amendment protects."  -- A.L.A. v. U.S. Dept. of Justice


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