Re: FHS's /usr/share/*
> Could sbdy explain me why?
>
> Why would I need to share this static data among several machines? This
> might mave been a concern when dskspace where a problem... Think that this
> breaks the idea of a packaging system too.
>
> And because this breaks the idea of a packaging system (the packaging
> system isn't designed fot this setup), /usr/share is designed for special
> multi-arch custom setups. I think that the whole distribution doesn't need to
> go under this traumatic change just for that. These custom setups coud just
> link /usr/doc to a shareable place.
>
> Don't you realize that is bad for Debian to do such a major change? We are
> doing major changes every single release!
(a) Just because Debian doesn't currently provide the facility to have
a setup which easily distinguishes shareable and non-shareable data
doesn't mean it's not a good thing.
(b) If someone is setting up a network, they can set up one machine
and NFS-mount /usr/share onto lots of other machines with possibly
different architectures. It would be nice if the design of DPKGv2
were to take this possibility into account in a clean way.
(c) Major changes are not necessarily bad. Traumatic, perhaps, but
not bad. They are bad if they are not well thought-out and well
planned, but the FHS team have been working on this for a while,
and this appears to be an intelligent solution.
(d) It's not as simple as linking /usr/doc to a shareable place. It's
more about trying to actually classify shareable vs. non-shareable
data.
(e) It doesn't break the idea of a packaging system, just the
execution of it. Let's say you have a list of packages you want
installed on your heterogeneous network. You can use
dpkg --get-selections to copy the selections around, but there
could be a way of saying "I already have the /usr/share part
mounted from elsewhere; I only want the architecture dependent
stuff." That would be cool, and facilitated by the presence of
/usr/share.
The things we have to watch out for are making sure that packages
don't explicitly depend upon /usr/doc being there, and change them if
they do.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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