Re: PROPOSAL for FHS revised : Mount points for CDs, floppies and alien OS partitions.]
Alan,
I attended the last LSB meeting in Palo Alto representing Sun
Microsystems, Inc. I am an old hand at various standards activities,
but am still learning the intended scope and purpose of the LSB.
>From bounce-lsb-spec=Don.Cragun=eng.sun.com@lists.linuxbase.org Thu Jun 22 06:53:22 2000
>Resent-Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 07:53:03 -0600 (MDT)
>X-Envelope-Sender: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
>Subject: Re: PROPOSAL for FHS revised : Mount points for CDs, floppies and alien OS partitions.]
>To: kukuk@suse.de (Thorsten Kukuk)
>Cc: lsb-spec@lists.linuxbase.org
>From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
>Resent-Message-ID: <rz30hB.A.us.8ohU5@murphy>
>X-Mailing-List: <lsb-spec@lists.linuxbase.org> archive/latest/1098
>
>> You should read the first lines of the FHS:
>
>I dont see where it mentions solaris and digital unix. I also cant find anything
>from either vendor saying they follow it
For purposes of this discussion, I will treat FHS as a part of
LSB. Sun makes it a policy to adhere to relevant standards when
possible. When there is an approved LSB specification, Sun would love
to be able build and run LSB conforming applications on Solaris
systems. Until there is an agreed upon LSB specification, you won't
here Sun saying "we follow (or implement or conform to) the draft LSB
spec". (We did that once by implementing and distributing a system
conforming to a POSIX threads draft specification several year ago.
We're still paying for it.) Until we understand the requirements
implied by claiming to conform to a standard, we can't say that we will
be able to adhere to it. On the other hand, we will be happy to
participate in the development of a standard in this area.
My personal opinion is that the FHS specification of /cdrom,
/mnt/cdrom, or /something_else/cdrom isn't going to help much except on
a single machine with access to no more than one CD-ROM device. On
machines with more than one device or access to devices on a network,
the application or the install script for the application is going to
have to ask the user where the CD has been (or should be) mounted
anyway. This applies to other devices as well. I thought the LSB
had a wider scope than this.
Although I know of no formal specification that says that /mnt
is to be used as a temporary mount point, thousands of operators and
system administrators taught by Bell Labs (and its AT&T, USL, ...
successors) were trained to rely on this convention. Now that backup
filesystems are less often mounted on removable media, it might not be
as important.
From my experience with standards, I think it is a mistake to
specify absolute pathnames for standard utilities. You will eventually
run into compatibility problems when a future revision of the spec
needs to introduce an incompatibility or when you have a distributor
that wants to support two standards that specify conflicting
requirements on /usr/bin/<your_favorite_utility_name_here>. If
applications get used to setting up $PATH in a manner appropriate to
the standard involved, everyone will be happier in the long run. (I
also understand that training application writers can be a royal pain
in the short run.)
Thanks,
Don
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