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

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

   From: Alan Cox <alan@cymru.net>
   Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 00:15:37 +0000 (GMT)

   > 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.

   One simple one - I want my mail on the spool disk. Its in the grows
   randomly, mostly crap, doesnt cause hassle if it fills for a while
   category

But I don't think the FHS should be specifying the actual location of
the files at all.  True, the FHS should not cause too much pain for the
certain obvious and common partition layouts, but once we enter the
realm of server systems, there's no guarantee where the mountpoints
might end up falling.  For example, I might want the mail files on /u1,
and the printer spool files in /u2 --- in which case there will probably
a number of symlinks in /var and /var/spool.  

The only thing that really matters is what pathnames applications can
count upon to work.  Given that the rest of the world is moving to
/var/mail, I think it would be good for us to start a gradual migration
to /var/mail.  The extra symlink doesn't cost anything, and gradually
moving applications over to use /var/mail really doesn't cost much
either.

						- Ted