Bug#741304: add FHS exception for arch-indep in /usr/lib
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> So, I propse adding to the list of exceptions in policy section 9.1.1:
> The FHS requirement that architecture-independent
> application-specific static files be located in /usr/share is relaxed
> to a suggestion.
> In particular, a subdirectory of /usr/lib may be used by a package
> (or a collection of packages) to hold a mixture of
> architecture-independent and architecture-dependent files. However,
> when a directory is entirely composed of architecture-independent
> files, it should be located in /usr/share.
Looks good to me. Seconded.
The use case for this separation (sharing /usr/share across multiple
systems with different architectures while keeping /usr/lib local to each
architecture or to a different mount specific to each architecture) hasn't
disappeared entirely, but it has shrunk considerably. I used to care
intensely about things like this when maintaining shared software builds
across nine architectures in the late 1990s, back when disk space was at a
premium and it was common to export various portions of the local file
system to a network share. Now, this technique is less common even in the
embedded space and almost unheard of outside of embedded systems, and it's
even less common to share those installations across architectures the way
we used to do.
It's still a distant nice-to-have, but I don't think it's worth spending
any significant amount of time on, and generally not worth patching
upstream source to support.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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