pre-draft of FHS 2.1
Just in case anyone missed the pre-draft of FHS 2.1 message that was
forwarded to debian-devel, here it is. It tries to address some of
the problems that have been holding up adoption by Debian and other
distributions.
Also, if you have any proposed patches (against the troff), comments,
or questions about the FHS 2.1 draft, please send them to the FHS list
or to me.
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From: Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com>
To: fhs-discuss@UCSD.Edu
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 22:32:50 -0700
Subject: FHS pre-2.1 draft #1 on web site
Surprise.
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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