Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>]

I keep hearing people claim that distribution folks are saying "ick",
but I haven't heard any technical reasons besides, "Moving spool
directories is hard".  When I and others have pointed out that moving
the spool directory isn't required; just a symlink, I have heard dead
silence.  So the lack of technical discussion, but just a stony-silence
"No!" is rather disappointing as far as I'm concerned.

I think we should require that new applications use /var/mail, and that
backwards compatibility symlinks should exist.

If we must back out /var/mail (for no good technical reason that I can
determine), then at the very least I think we should state that there
that for all compliant distributions, /var/mail *MUST* be a valid way of
reaching the spool directory (i.e., there should be a symlink there, or
where the spool directory actually lives) and that it be permissible for
applications to use /var/mail to find the mail directory (but that
applications that want to keep using /var/spool/mail would not be
considered obsolete).

At least that way applications that want to use the same dirctory as the
vast majority of other Unix systems will work without needing a special
case for Linux.  However, I would much rather see us adopt the full,
correct solution, rather than this half-measure.

						- Ted